HP today declared itself back on the up with what it referred to as its biggest storage announcements in over a decade.
On the eve of the HP Discover 2012 conference in Frankfurt, the company gathered international press to reveal significant updates to its converged storage portfolio, which it boldly claimed will lead a revolution in data storage.
HP attributed this revolution to the use of a modern single storage architecture to provide 'polymorphic simplicity', which is a new concept that enables a single-system architecture to exist in several forms whilst retaining common data services for block, object and file applications. The concept also calls for optimisation for both hard disk drives (HDD) and solid state disks (SSD).
The first announcement centred on the latest result of HP's acquisition of 3PAR. The new HP 3PAR StoreServ 7000 range was dubbed by the company as the industry's only midrange quad-controller platform offering tier one storage availability and quality-of-service features at an easy entry price point for organisations.
Supporting both block and file data services, the system is available with HDD and SSD or as an all-SSD configuration capable of performing more than 320,000 input/output operations per section, a number HP claimed was 2.4 times that of a similarly priced competitive array.
The second portfolio expansion to be revealed was HP StoreOnce 2000 and 4000 Backup with support for HP StoreOnce Catalyst software.
These new models provide efficient data movement and high-performance deduplication to reduce data protection costs in remote sites and data centres, and perform backup operations up to three times faster at a 35 percent lower cost than the closest competitive system, HP said.
The final product to be unveiling was HP StoreAll Storage, a highly scalable platform for object and file data access, providing a simplified environment for big data retention and cloud storage that reduces the need for additional administrators or hardware.
HP StoreAll Express Query was create by HP Labs, the company's central research arm, and is a metadata database that HP claims will allow clients to conduct search queries 100,000 times faster than previous file system search methods.
HP and Autonomy may be at war in the financial and governance departments, but it was clear at the event that HP remains enthusiastic when it comes to Autonomy's technologies. Integration with HP Autonomy Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) offloads processing tasks to HP StoreAll so that analytics can be performed with more current data whilst using less compute hardware.
Additional integration with HP StoreAll and HP Autonomy Consolidated Archive, as well as certification of other independent software vendor applications, provides safe, long-term retention of digital assets, HP added.
"Legacy storage vendors are simply not equipped to help organisations respond to new workloads, and bolting on new features to old architectures has created a nightmare," said David Scott, Senior VP and GM, HP Storage.
"HP's unique set of converged storage innovations helps clients simplify infrastructure and reduce costs with a common architecture across storage segments and categories."
The HP StoreServ 7200 is available globally immediately starting at $20,000. HP StoreServ 7400 starts at $32,000. HP Priority Optimization will be available in 2013.
HP StoreOnce 6200 Backup systems are available worldwide immediately for a starting price of $250,000. HP StoreOnce 2000 Backup systems start at $10,000 and HP StoreOnce 4000 Backup systems start at $30,000. Both systems are available immediately worldwide. HP StoreOnce Catalyst Software licenses start at $500.
HP StoreAll Storage is expected to be available globally on Dec. 20, with pricing as low as $0.91 per GB.
