Building on IDC`s ranking of the company as the third largest storage provider in the world, HP has stepped up activities and revealed details of new virtual storage arrays, network-attached storage solutions and storage management software.
The news is further delivery on the Federated Storage Area Management (Fsam) strategy that HP debuted in March this year. HP`s goal with Fsam, according to international management, is to allow customers to build highly-scalable and manageable storage infrastructures while optimising their use of storage resources.
"In line with the Fsam vision, we are bringing the industry`s first 2.0GB fibre channel virtual disk array to market early next month," explains Graeme Smith, storage marketing manager at HP South Africa.
"Two new pre-configured and rack-mounted NAS solutions will also be available, as will a range of software and software-based programs for our XP storage systems."
This is all part of HP`s drive to grab an even larger slice of the external storage market pie - an area that IDC predicts will be worth over $53 billion by 2004.
"There are a small number of companies vying for dominance in that massive market - HP, EMC and Compaq being the three primary players, with IBM and Sun also jostling for positions," says Smith. Based on IDC figures for the overall external storage market in 2000, HP`s market share had grown by 34%; this compared to EMC`s growth of 7% and Compaq`s drop of 14%.
First up in these announcements is the VA7400. Offering almost 8TB of capacity, it ranks as HP`s highest capacity mid-range storage array and is targeted at mid-range and high-end online transaction processing, high-end data warehousing and decision support systems, system consolidation, data analysis and simulation.
"What we are offering here is the high-density system with a small footprint, the intention being to help customers maximise spatial resources for lower overhead costs, while benefiting from facilities such as Business Copy [usually found only in high-end systems]," says Smith.
From a NAS standpoint, two solutions - the HP Surestore NAS XP or NAS VA - are to hit the local market, each offering simplified, high-performance storage management in multi-operating system environments.
"The NAS XP solutions provides service providers, e-businesses and large enterprises industry-leading performance, availability and raw storage capacity of up to 37TB," explains Smith.
"The smaller NAS Virtual Array offers an efficient, cost-effective solution for companies accessing and sharing large amounts of file system data."
Several software-based programs will be available as a result of these storage announcements:
`Instant Capacity on Demand (iCOD)` manages storage growth and protects storage investments by having inactive extra capacity pre-installed on the HP XP data system. The extra capacity can be quickly activated to cover unexpected growth and requires no initial investment.
HP `Continuous Access over Fibre Channel` software provides high bandwidth connectivity, resulting in fewer remote links and lower costs. This optional functionality maximises the use of array resources and simplifies management through high-performance remote mirroring.
"Linux users also benefit from consolidated solutions for the HP XP disk array line," says Smith.
"SAN infrastructure support, integration into management tools, heterogeneous server/storage consolidation, consulting and support all help meet requirements for an always-on e-business. Linux applications can be deployed on existing storage and SANs using existing management processes and staff resources."
For more information on HP`s new storage solutions, point a browser to www.wswinteractive.com/hp/nsso.
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