Category: HP Storage

Enterprises are looking for better returns on IT investments, including dramatically increasing the ability to respond to changing business requirements. They want cloud service provider-like flexibility, performance, and security even when they don’t have service provider-sized budgets.

More enterprises than ever are ready to take the next step in their virtualization journey by virtualizing mission critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange 2010. Yet taking Exchange 2010 virtual in enterprise environments involves much more than simply hosting Exchange on a powerful server and then hoping that the underlying storage is up to the challenge.

Fitting “enterprise” storage systems into small and midsized businesses (SMBs) requires they deliver all of the features without the up-front capital or ongoing management costs. To date, that has rarely been the case with SMBs either needing to make trade-offs in cost or ease of use to get the storage system they need. That changed earlier this month with HP’s introduction of its HP StoreEasy and StoreVirtual that bring into SMBs the storage system efficiency, security, reliability and availability once previously only reserved for enterprise storage products.

Many businesses are allocating a portion of their IT budgets to Big Data analytics projects. At the same time, a certain amount of technology spending is necessarily tied to risk management and compliance because a failure to meet minimum eDiscovery and legal hold requirements can have disastrous consequences. While these twin priorities often compete for funding, it is now possible for an enterprise to adopt a single core technology to address both their data analytics and compliance requirements and double their bang for the buck in the process.

Virtual storage appliances (VSAs) are emerging as an ideal way for small and midsized businesses (SMBs) to keep their storage hardware costs under control while retaining the benefits that networked storage systems have to offer. But as VSA offerings proliferate, determining which vendor’s VSA solution is the right one for an SMB to adopt becomes more difficult. Helping to make that decision easier is the latest series of enhancements that HP adds to its StoreVirtual VSA making it arguably the best VSA solution available today.

In the last few years deduplication and backup have become almost inseparable. Yet where a large degree of separation still exists is in how deduplication is implemented with different deduplication techniques implemented at various stages in the backup process. Dedupe 2.0 promises to fix this jumbled approach to deduplication but to fix it, there first has to be someone delivering it. HP’s new StoreOnce Catalyst release starts to introduce some order in today’s backup process by doing more than simply delivering on its Dedupe 2.0 vision. It potentially gives organizations some hours back in their day as well.

The allure of client virtualization is increasing in the eyes of enterprise organizations. Aside from its obvious benefits of eliminating the management headaches and upgrade cycles of corporate desktops and laptops, organizations can better meet the growing demands of employees who want to bring their own devices (BYOD) to access corporate networks. However client virtualization can result in enterprises simply swapping one set of problems for another unless organizations first assess what their requirements are so they may put a solution in place with the right framework for their environment.

New found agility, reduced CAPEX and OPEX and centralized IT infrastructure management are driving the adoption of private clouds. But as organizations enter them their dark side of management complexities becomes more plainly seen. This is where HP’s heightened integration with Microsoft Systems Center 2012 with its Virtual Machine Manager component comes into play.

Using a common console to manage servers and storage coupled with a roadmap to automated disaster recovery (DR) are becoming almost prerequisites in VMware vSphere deployments. Key to delivering on these emerging requirements is employing a midrange array that (1) integrates with and is managed by vCenter Server, and (2) facilitates the implementation of VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM).

Using array-based snapshots for virtual machine (VM) protection and optimizing storage efficiency are two sought after features in VMware deployments. However, this does not mean that all midrange arrays deliver on these capabilities equally. If anything, the differences in how midrange arrays support them may be quite substantial.