HP announced a range of new enhancements to its Converged Storage portfolio, intended to address storage management issues within virtualized, cloud and big data archive environments. The refresh of the company’s storage portfolio includes new HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage, HP StoreAll Storage, and HP StoreOnce Backup product offerings.
With the understanding that the storage sprawl at many organizations is unsustainable, the goal of the updated HP storage portfolio is to simplify the overall experience within customer environments, Craig Nunes, vice president of worldwide marketing, HP Storage, tells 5 Minute Briefing. “That will deliver much better ROI from an asset utilization standpoint,” he says, noting that customers will not have to buy as much capital equipment “because they will be running in a much more efficient way. They will save time by taking complexity out so cycle times will be better.” According to HP, many organizations waste as much as 70% of their budgets on excess capacity, while at the same time, administrators struggle to manage multiple disparate storage architectures.
With the new announcements, HP is expanding its HP 3PAR StoreServ portfolio to include HP 3PAR StoreServ 7000 Storage, a midrange quad-controller platform offering Tier 1 storage availability and quality of service features at a lower entry price. 3Par StoreServ has traditionally been a platform focused on the high end of the storage space, Nunes says. “We are taking that 3PAR capability that has become highly regarded in the high end, and taken those capabilities down into the entry of the midrange.”
Supporting both block and file data services, the system is available with HDD and SSD. The all SSD version of the new 3PAR StorServ 7000 platform is capable of performing more than 320,000 input/output operations per second, HP claims. The company says it is also developing an SSD-optimized 3PAR model that delivers greater performance and richer data services.
The second area of HP's storage solution enhancements revolves around HP StoreAll Storage, a platform for object and file data access that provides a more simplified environment for big data archive and cloud storage.
StoreAll is a platform intended for consolidation of unstructured data, explains Nunes. With this round of enhancements HP introduced a powerful search capability through a NoSQL database built into the StoreAll platform called Express Query, which indexes the data as it is loaded in, enabling users to conduct search queries 100,000 times faster than previous file system search methods. Integration with HP Autonomy Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) offloads processing tasks to HP StoreAll so that analytics can be rapidly performed with more current data and using less compute hardware. Additional integration with HP StoreAll and HP Autonomy Consolidated Archive, as well as certification of other independent software vendor applications, provides safe, long-term retention of digital assets.
In the third key part of the HP storage announcements, the StoreOnce backup portfolio, which was introduced in June for the high-end market, now includes systems aimed at the enterprise edge or SMB markets that can perform backup operations up to three times faster at a 35% lower cost than the closest competitive system, says HP. The new HP StoreOnce 2000 and 4000 Backup, with support for HP StoreOnce Catalyst software, provides efficient data movement and high-performance deduplication to reduce data protection costs in remote sites and data centers.
Enhancements also have been made to the 6000 series aimed at high-end customers to provide multi-tenancy features necessary for enterprises and service providers.
Overall, the unifying theme for the refresh is “polymorphic simplicity,” says Nunes. “We are going to deliver a storage system that can do many things, that can take on many shapes, but is still in effect a single architecture, a single storage operating system, that can do many things for our customers. That means that they are going to wind up buying less, and saving money on capital equipment. We are going to wring out a lot of the complexity that is mired in having so many storage silos.”
More information is available from HP about the Converged Storage portfolio, including the HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage, HP StoreAll Storage, and HP StoreOnce Backup product offerings.