Wednesday, 20 June 2007

HP Launches New Storage Systems That Reduce Power Bills

Hewlett Packard has launched a range of "green" storage software and hardware products, which the company claims will cut storage array power and cooling costs in data centres for enterprises and SMBs by as much as 50 per cent...

Hewlett Packard has launched a range of "green" storage software and hardware products, which the company claims will cut storage array power and cooling costs in data centres for enterprises and SMBs by as much as 50 per cent.

At an launch event in Singapore today, HP launched the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) 4100, 6100 and 8100, new tape drives based on the LTO-4 standard and a tape product designed for HP BladeSystem c-Class enclosures. These products come at a time when enterprises are continuing to push technology vendors to find ways to help them reduce power and cooling costs in their data centres.

Jim Wagstaff, vice President, HP Storage Works, APAC, Japan said the new EVAs are as much as 45 per cent more power efficient and 24 per cent faster than previous EVA models. They use technologies such EVA Dynamic Capacity Management, Vsnap and low-cost Fibre ATA drives to improve drive utilisation, eliminate unnecessary drive purchases and reduce energy consumption.

Thin provisioning is a way that IT administrators can use storage resource management and virtualisation to put limits on the allocation of physical storage to meet what applications immediately need. The result is improved capacity on demand up to preset limits, so that enterprises can reduce the need to buy and manage excess disk storage.

The Dynamic Capacity Management (DCM) technology lets customers increase utilisation rates by dynamically provisioning storage resources according to application needs. A new virtual-disk-service, volume-shrink feature in Microsoft Windows Server 2008 allows DCM to continuously monitor storage-utilization rates and automatically grow or shrink host volumes.

The HP StorageWorks LTO-4 Ultrium1840 tape drives for midsize and enterprise customers consume 50 per cent or fewer watts per gigabyte than previous generations of HP tape drives. The LTO-4 Ultrium 1840 tape drives also will be integrated into HP tape libraries.

Wagstaff said tape would continue to be a key technology in the storage industry, despite years of claims that it was fading away, and energy efficiency is one reason. Enterprises will need to continue to store large amounts of data for long periods of time.

The new StorageWorks LTO-4 Ultrium1840 tape drive is aimed at midsize and enterprise customers, and offers high capacity and fast performance with energy savings that include up to 50 per cent fewer watts per gigabyte than previous generations being consumed.