HP Moves To Help Consolidate, Secure Data

Hewlett-Packard Tuesday upgraded its storage line card with enhancements aimed at storage consolidation and security.

The enhancements, unveiled at the company's HP Asia Pacific StorageWorks Conference, held this week in Vietnam, include additions to its EVA arrays, a new embedded Cisco switch, a new NAS gateway, and encryption for HP's Data Protector software.

Among the changes is HP StorageWorks EVA File Services, which enables HP's EVA line of arrays to manage data in both the block and the file formats, said Harry Baeverstad, general manager for NAS in HP's StorageWorks division.

With EVA File Services, the EVA4000, EVA6000, and EVA8000 now provide a single shared pool of storage for both types of data, Baeverstad said. "This allows customers to consolidate islands of storage into single pools and cut the cost of managing islands," he said.

HP's first product to bring block and file data into a single device was its All-In-One, an appliance the company unveiled in September for the small and midsize business space.

"We're taking that solution into the enterprise space with the EVA," Baeverstad said. "We're providing a simple solution to a very complicated environment."

HP Monday also upgraded its ProLiant DL585 Storage Server to serve data on an iSCSI SAN with the addition of the R2 version of Microsoft's Unified Data Storage Server 2003 software, which includes the iSCSI target software Microsoft acquired from String Bean Software early last year.

NAS gateways are storage appliances that serve data in a file format in the same fashion as NAS appliances. Unlike NAS appliances, however, NAS gateways do not have their own storage capacity, but instead store the data on other storage devices connected to a SAN that would otherwise serve the data in blocks instead of as files.

HP also bumped up the performance of the ProLiant DL585 G2, as the new model is known, with the addition of 64-bit AMD dual-core processors, Baeverstad said.

Also new is the Cisco MDS 9124e Fabric switch, a 4-Gbps, 12-port or 24-port Fibre Channel switch that plugs into HP's c-Class blade server chassis. The switch joins similar blade switches from Brocade.

HP also added 256-bit encryption technology to its HP Data Protector backup software. With the technology, the data is encrypted on-the-fly as it is sent over a network for protection both as it is moving and as it sits on the backup device, Baeverstad said.

HP StorageWorks EVA File Services is expected to be available March 1 with a list price of about $90,000 for two nodes. The HP ProLiant DL585 G2 Storage Server, expected to ship next week, is slated to have a list price starting at $18,687. The Cisco MDS 9124e switch is expected to list for $5,999 for the 12-port model and $9,500 for the 24-port model when it ships March 1. And the HP Data Protector Software, with a list price of $2,950 for 10 clients, will get the encryption capability sometime in February, HP said.

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