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    HP Pursues Polymorphic Storage Simplicity

    As organizations continue to struggle with the sheer volume of data coming into the enterprise, it’s no secret that storing all that data is a problem that continues to fester. Not only is storage consuming an unacceptably larger percentage of the IT budget, as the amount of data on those systems increases the actual performance of the systems starts to drop. Clearly, there is a pressing need to find a better way to manage storage.

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    Five Data Storage Predictions for 2012

    Hewlett-Packard today at the HP Discover 2012 conference wants to help IT organizations rise to the challenge via a significant expansion of the HP Converged Storage portfolio that relies heavily on autonomic management capabilities to reduce the total cost of storage, while at the same time embracing NoSQL database technology to improve productivity.

    New additions to the portfolio include storage offerings that make the company’s 3PAR storage systems more affordable to midrange and larger customer alike. In addition, HP launched HP StoreAll Storage, a suite of software that automates a range of storage management functions and HP StoreAll Express Query, a NoSQL database that allows IT organizations to conduct search queries 100,000 times faster using metadata stored in the database.

    HP also announced new backup and recovery offerings that the company claims are 35 percent faster than the closest equivalently priced systems.

    As data storage becomes a major problem in the enterprise, Craig Nunes, vice president of marketing, Storage, says HP is adding advanced features such as giving IT organizations the ability to prioritize I/O flows associated with a particular application over others. The overall goal, says Nunes, is to deliver an array of storage systems that can efficiently handle a wide range of data types in a way that is highly transparent to the applications that are dependent on those systems, which Nunes refers to as “polymorphic simplicity.”

    IT organizations of all sizes are trying to cope with a complex mix of file, block and object-based storage systems that are collectively expensive to manage. As storage becomes more unified, the cost of managing that storage becomes less expensive thanks to increased reliance on automation. It’s unclear exactly how much data the average administrator should be able to handle in this new age of data storage, but what is clear is that the days when every type of data format required its own data management specialist are quickly, and perhaps mercifully, coming to an end.

    Mike Vizard
    Mike Vizard
    Michael Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist, with nearly 30 years of experience writing and editing about enterprise IT issues. He is a contributor to publications including Programmableweb, IT Business Edge, CIOinsight and UBM Tech. He formerly was editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise, where he launched the company’s custom content division, and has also served as editor in chief for CRN and InfoWorld. He also has held editorial positions at PC Week, Computerworld and Digital Review.

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