HP Makes Converged Storage Push

Ten Steps You Shouldn’t Take to Make Storage Run Faster

The amount of data that most IT organizations are being asked to manage is putting a premium not only on space, but actual scalability. The majority of IT organizations are now routinely being asked to manage 10 to 100 times more data without adding more people to the IT staff.

To rise to that challenge, Hewlett-Packard today is launching a series of converged storage offerings that can not only scale out to handle as much as 180TB of data, they can be deployed as either as a physical appliance or as a virtual appliance that gets installed on top of a standard x86 server platform.

Based on HP Lefthand Networks storage technology, the HP StoreVirtual 4630 platform is an iSCSI-based storage system that provides 11.25TB of storage per rack at a price point that HP says is priced 40 percent lower per gigabyte than the previous generation of systems.

In addition, HP is unveiling a D220b storage blade configured with HP StoreVirtual VSA software that can be plugged directly into an HP Proliant Gen8 server.

Finally, the company is also making Fibre-channel versions of the HP StoreVirtual product line available.

According to Dale Degen, worldwide SAN marketing manager for HP, the demands we put on storage these days require a modern IT infrastructure system that not only scales out, but is also easy to manage. That requires a set of storage systems that come with a robust set of application programming interfaces that allows them to essentially be programmed, which is generally being referred to now as the era of software-defined storage.

The rate at which IT organizations will modernize their storage systems will vary by organization. But the fact that the amount of data organizations need to manage is growing by leaps and bounds makes replacing existing storage systems based on legacy architectures inevitable for most organizations.