HP Co. has announced the integration of 3PAR’s storage technology into the storage and network stack of its converged infrastructure portfolio, which it says will support customers’ adoption of cloud computing.
The company has combined the 3PAR Utility Storage platform with HP CloudSystem, which it said will equip businesses with a storage system that it is “perfect” for all types of cloud – public, private and hybrid. It also centralises servers, storage and network management
David Chalmers, CTO of HP’s Enterprise Storage and Servers, UK & Ireland, said that the reasons for this include the technology’s scalability, thin provisioning and multitenant capabilities, which means that different people can access it at any time.
“Thin provisioning means you only grow it [the storage] as you need to,” Chalmers said.
In addition, HP has integrated 3PAR’s technology with HP X9300 Network Storage Systems, which is based on IBRIX network attached storage (NAS) technology.
As well as enabling multitenancy, Chalmers said the 3PAR technology will allow HP X9300 users to manage their data more efficiently, which is a growing challenge at a time when data,structured and unstructured, is growing massively.
“It can automatically move the data around so that the hot, new data is at the top, and the ones that are accessed less go to the bottom [so they do not occupy the expensive storage top-tier storage level],” he explained.
The new HP X9300 system will be able to scale up to 16 petabytes, which Chalmers said will reduce a business’s need to buy storage capacity, saving them up to 50 percent on storage costs (based on the current experiences of HP 3PAR Utility Storage users).
HP also announced the shipping of its Microsoft Exchange-in-a-box product, HP E5000 Messaging System, which comes on the back of a US$250 million partnership between HP and Microsoft unveiled a year ago. This potentially gives the vendors a bigger stake in the market for integrated hardware-and-software appliances designed to run business applications.
“It’s a standard device with two single Intel Blades. They don’t need storage controllers [which are expensive and complex] – we do it in the blade,” said Chalmers.
Catherine Campbell, Chief strategist of HP StorageWorks UK and Ireland, added: “It’s pre-installed, pre-configured, and customers just install it by using a sort of wizard process. It’s a faster move to Exchange 2010 and enables predictable costs.”
Campbell said that customers will be migrating from an existing version of Exchange to the newer one by building the new infrastructure and moving users, because the infrastructure is so different.
“It’s a great opportunity for organisations to revisit the infrastructure. It frees up the very expensive storage for redeployment – it’s not written off,” she said.
Prices for the HP E5000 Messaging System series range from a starting price of $35,900 (£22,044) for the E5300 with 500 mailboxes, $41,400 (£25,424) for the E5500 with 1,000 mailboxes and from $68,500 (£42,066) for the E5700 with 3,000 mailboxes.