Category: HP Storage

One of the more revealing findings out of the recent DCIG 2012 Midrange Array Buyer’s Guide was the gap between those midrange arrays that integrate with the VMware vSphere storage APIs and those that do not, as it was almost a case of the “Have’s” and the “Have-not’s.” But among the “Have’s” there are still levels of differentiation in vSphere integration that the Buyer’s Guide did not examine in depth.

It is rare to find is a storage configuration that improves the efficiency and manageability of large Exchange deployments even as it improves speed and performance. So it is notable that HP’s recently released Exchange Solution Review Program (ESRP) results for Microsoft Exchange 2010 meet both existing and new enterprise requirements while tripling Exchange’s database performance over that of competitive storage systems.

“Dedupe everywhere” is becoming a guiding principle in how enterprises now strategically look to deploy data deduplication into their organizations. But it is now recognized that these organizations need a common mechanism to deduplicate data throughout their environment to optimally manage and scale it. It is in this context that HP recently announced its new StoreOnce B6200 Backup System along with a number of StoreOnce feature enhancements as HP takes its deduplication story further into the enterprise.

The introduction of the HP P10000 into the HP 3PAR line of storage systems about three (3) months ago firmly put 3PAR systems in the realm of high end, Tier 1 storage. But the new V400 and V800 models in the HP P10000 line do more than increase the available storage capacity and performance of existing 3PAR storage systems. They indicate that the mainframe-like requirements that enterprise data centers have for storage systems persist and that, in order for HP to keep up, it needed to introduce a high end storage system that possessed “Big Iron” like attributes to meet these growing storage cloud requirements.

No one ever gets every decision right the first time. In fact, most of us are lucky to get most of our decisions mostly right most of the time. Yet to date storage administrators have been forced to live in somewhat of an alternate universe where the expectation is that they plan and execute on storage allocations perfectly every time.

In 2010 the amount of digital information created in the world exceeded a zettabyte for the first time. Now, in 2011, enterprises have to deal with the reality of managing and storing that amount of data. As they do so, they are coming to the realization that the majority of that data may only be actively accessed for a short period of time.

Among the plethora of news today from VMware, its larger announcements are the introduction of a new cloud infrastructure initiative and the general availability of vSphere 5.0 in late August. These announcements are particularly noteworthy in the storage industry as vSphere contains enhancements to many of its existing data storage and data protection APIs plus vSphere offers up a new API that deals exclusively with array management.

Virtualizing business critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange 2010 is the next frontier in server virtualization. But as organizations move down this path, sizing the underlying hardware that will host these applications becomes much more complex. This explains why we are seeing the emergence of reference configurations such as what HP has introduced for Microsoft Exchange 2010.

Block and file storage platforms are many times viewed by enterprises as mutually exclusive designed to solve very specific application workloads. But the lines between what data should reside on block and file-based storage platforms have begun to blur. To alleviate this uncertainty a new bond between these two storage platforms has emerged with providers delivering them as a single solution, the latest evidence of this being HP’s qualification of its X9000 Network Storage System (IBRIX) for use with 3PAR Storage Systems via its X9300 Network Storage Gateway

Deduplication is indeed a technology with tremendous benefit for organizations, and a single deduplication algorithm across an entire enterprise will certainly revolutionize backup and disaster recovery operations. Although realization of that vision is still some time away, the technology building toward it can be seen in the HP D2D4324 Backup System with StoreOnce deduplication.