I’m currently at HP’s TechDay in Colorado Springs hearing about their StorageWorks offerings, everything from data de-duplication through to EVA and LeftHand  storage systems.  I have been working with HP server and storage products for many years and there were a couple of surprises for me yesterday. The first being that I found out that HP actually have a data de-duplication offering which consists of not one but two data de-duplication products in the form of the inline de-dupe HP D2D, which is targeted at smaller IT environments and the more performant larger scale post-process HP VLS product.

The second surprise was the HP StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform (SVSP) which apparently has been available for quite sometime in some form or another though HP have successfully kept it something of  a secret which is surprising really for what it offers.  So what is SVSP?  Well, imagine you have an IT environment where you have a number of storage appliances, which incidentally don’t necessarily need to be from HP, each containing their own silo’s of data and spare disk capacity – wouldn’t it be nice if you could pool together all this storage and then share it out whilst at the same time providing an easy mechanism to non-disruptively add extra capacity in the future?  All of this managed from an intuitive management interface.  Well this is exactly what the HP SVSP product can offer whilst providing additional features such as easy data migration, thin provisioning, copy services (clones and snapshots) and synchronous and asynchronous mirroring. 

Below: HP SVSP Management interface

I was fortunate enough to be given an SVSP emulator to take away and use so expect a further post from me around this product sometime in the future.  If this sounds like it is of interest you can find out more on the HP site here.

SMB Product Announcement:

There has also been an announcement from HP this morning around a range of new products targeting the SMB market.  As this a StorageWorks TechDay of particular interest is the X500  and X3000 shared storage appliances.  The X500 runs Windows Home Server though this good looking enclosure could be a good candidate to have OpenFiler installed on it and to be used as an iSCSI appliance – great for your home or work VMware ESX or Hyper-V lab.  I will get time to investigate this more today.  The X3000 on the other hand is definitely geared more at the larger SMB looking for a more enterprise level shared file storage solution.  The following is taken from this mornings announcement:

- For affordable data management, the HP StorageWorks X500 Data Vault Series (starting at $699) allows small businesses to remain competitive by improving the protection of critical business data and automating backups. It enables small businesses with up to 10 PC and Mac clients to store information in a central place and easily share files regardless of employee location. Also, business owners can save money through a low purchase price, which is up to 22 percent less than comparable solutions.

- For maximum uptime, the HP StorageWorks X3000 Network Storage Systems High Availability Bundles combine hardware and software into an efficient shared storage solution for file and application data. Based on the HP StorageWorks X3000 Network Storage Gateways and HP StorageWorks  MSA2000 G2 storage arrays, the bundles increase efficiency by automatically eliminating duplicate files, protecting against drive failures and reducing setup time by up to 50 percent. Helping to keep costs in check, the solution does not require extra license fees for networking protocols, file replication or snapshot capabilities.

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