Hewlett-Packard opened its StorageWorks conference in Las Vegas Monday with the company’s largest release of new storage products and services in its history.
During the opening keynote address, Ann Livermore, executive vice president for the technology sales group, said the new storage products and services are responding to three major shifts in the information technology industry.
The first is the move to digital content. “All content is going to be digital,” said Livermore. “That is true at work, at school and at home,” she said.
The second major shift is the embedding of technology in all aspects of daily life, Livermore said. “When that technology is embedded, we want it to be easy to use,” she said.
The third major shift is the fact that the technology landscape is more heterogeneous than in the past, she said. “Because of that, we want to make sure these things work together,” she said.
Among the new products HP will be a major refresh of its Enterprise Virtual Arrays (EVAs) and the company’s first venture into the enterprise Network Attached Storage domain with the HP StorageWorks Enterprise File Services (EFS) Clustered Gateway.
Among the other products HP will introduce will be the HP StorageWorks Enterprise File Services WAN Accelerator that will speed up storage for branch office applications, the HP StorageWorks 6000 Virtual Library System to improve backup and recovery performance, and the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Modular Library E-series that expands HP’s enterprise library products.
The company also announced the Information Lifecycle Management Services Framework, a set of storage consulting, support, and management services and Fast Recovery Solutionsfor database environments.
While HP’s first venture into the network-attached storage (NAS) space garnered most of the attention, less cutting-edge technologies, such as tape, also received some attention.
The company’s new HP StorageWorks Enterprise Modular Library E-series expands HP’s enterprise library family and pairs with the company’s EVA line of servers as the backup component. The new StorageWorks 6000 Virtual Library System uses software from Sepaton to improve backup speeds and recovery performance.
Speaking about the virtual tape backup product, Bob Wilson, vice president of HP’s near line storage division, said.
“It’s for SAN-based backup. Disk-to-disk backup can be quite complex, but I believe we’ve worked out a lot of the issues in this product.
