HP&#39;s StorageWorks Grid Approach Makes Data Dynamic
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Hewlett-Packard has unveiled its storage grid architecture strategyâan approach that company executives claim is faster and more efficient than comparable products and systems on the market today.
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(InfoWorld) - The $100 millionÂ datacenter consolidation projectÂ being undertaken by Hewlett-Packard will help it be more efficient but also informs the consulting advice it gives to client companies. HP officials updated customers, employees and partners on the progress of its project Tuesday at the HP Technology Forum being held in Las Vegas. The company is in the second year of a three-year process to consolidate 85 datacenters worldwide in just six -- two each in Atlanta, Houston, and Austin, Texas. Three of the six new sites are already up and running and the remaining three should be completed within 60 days, said Randy Mott, executive vice president and chief information officer of HP. "It's not just around moving stuff to a different place," said Mott, in a clear case of understatement. Data center consolidation gives HP, and any company that does it, a chance to refresh their technology, move to industry standard products, eliminate redundant or outdated hardware and software, and engineer energy efficiency, a major concern of late, into the datacenter. At the Tech Forum, Mott said the data center project, which is scheduled to be completed in late 2008, will reduce the total number of servers by 30 percent, but increase the total processing power by 80 percent. It will reduce the cost of storage but double total storage capacity, and the cost of running HP's corporate network will go down but the bandwidth will be tripled. HP has already decommissioned 12 of the 86 datacenters, said Mott. And for HP, going through the process gives its HP Services group new insights they can apply to customers trying to upgrade their data centers. "We try make sure it's done right inside HP and then we can do that for customers," said Tony Redmond, vice president and chief technology officer for HP Services. Teams from HP's IT department, which handles the company's own IT systems, and from the HP Technology Services unit, which provides technology to client firms, work together on the datacenter project. Work the HP Services people do will help the Technology Services people advise their own clients, Redmond said. HP's technology infrastructure developed in a piecemeal fashion, just like that of many other companies. For instance, part of the project involves what companies call "software rationalization," going through the thousands of software applications that HP uses to weed out those that are redundant, outdated or just useless. HP applications may be duplicated by similar applications from Compaq Computer, which HP acquired in 2002 and Digital Equipment, which Compaq bought in 1998. HP is also going to deploy a new approach to cooling at the new datacenters. Called Dynamic Smart Cooling, it involves a number of heat sensors attached to each of the servers in a datacenter. The sensors can tell when a server is heating up because it's doing a lot of processing and then directs cold air at that server. When the server slows down, the sensor can tell and the cold air reduced. Dynamic Smart Cooling, developed within HP Labs, will demonstrate at HP's own datacenters how the technology may work for others.
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The leading vendors in the data warehousing market are running scared of new entrants to the market that are offering data warehouse appliances (i.e. pre-integrated hardware, software, storage combinations) that can offer greatly superior performance at a significantly lower price.  In this white paper we will dispel the 'fog of war' that currently pervades the data warehousing landscape, dismissing those question marks that are irrelevant and gratuitous, but highlighting any genuine issues that need to be addressed.
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HP (NYSE:HPQ) (Nasdaq:HPQ) today announced the industry's first easy-to-use storage systems that drive down cost and complexity for small and medium businesses (SMBs) grappling with the exponential growth of data.
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Storage appliance maker EqualLogic Inc. says its newest product improves performance by doing a better job of balancing the data load between storage arrays in a network.
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Virtualised SAN and NAS bid for your storage grid
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Network Appliance has brought out the latest version of its Data Ontap software, which imposes a grid storage architecture on NetApp devices by creating an abstraction layer between application servers, storage controllers and disc arrays.
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-Packard Co. is acquiring a storage software company that the company says will give it important leverage in the enterprise-class network-attached storage (NAS) market. HP on Monday signed a definitive agreement to acquire PolyServe Inc., of Beaverton, Oregon, but did not disclose the terms of the transaction. PolyServe has 117 employees. With PolyServe's software, information from file or database servers can be consolidated into a single, shared pool of storage that is highly available and can be expanded to match business demands, HP said in a news release. PolyServe, founded in 1999, has been an HP partner for the last two years. Its software can run on HP's storage arrays and Proliant servers in Linux and Microsoft Corp. Windows environments. The acquisition also means HP can run PolyServe software on NAS blade servers. Blades are the fastest growing segment of the server industry. HP placed second to EMC Corp. in storage hardware revenue in the third quarter of 2006, according to a report from IDC. HP held 17.6 percent of the worldwide market in the third quarter with sales of US$760 million, while EMC lead with a 21.4 percent share on revenue of $927 million.
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Over the next two years network based storage virtualization will remain a niche, while thin provisioning will enjoy rapid adoption in the enterprise. And, applying network-based storage virtualization to pool arrays isn't likely to improve this environment if efficient utilization hasn't already been achieved.
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Network Appliance has announced what it terms a key milestone in its Storage Grid vision with the release of its Data ONTAP 7G enterprise storage software, which the company is touting as bringing newer functionality and lower costs to the concept of
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HP and Microsoft combine forces to deliver some user-friendly features that take this early Windows Home Server box beyond mere network-attached storage.
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At Storage Networking World (SNW) in Orlando this week, several storage vendors are adding to their arsenal of products and technologies aimed at IT managers dealing with the explosion of data storage.
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Linux Networx has developed a clustered storage appliance which is able to pool capacity from separate storage devices into a single high-capacity resource.
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Oracle has launched a new set of business intelligence (BI) tools for its grid-enabled database technology. The BI 10g product has been separated out of Oracle&#39;s existing application server software.
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The benchmark consists of three workloads designed to demonstrate the performance of a storage configuration during the execution of business-critical applications that require large-scale, sequential movement of data. The
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New TagmaStore plays well with rivals' arrays to keep watch over 32 petabytes of data.
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InfoWorld - Hewlett-Packard Co. is acquiring a storage software company that the company says will give it important leverage in the enterprise-class network-attached storage (NAS) market.