HP Makes ILM Solutions Easier

Among the new products is MSA 1500cs, an array that allows high-speed SCSI and low-cost Serial ATA hard drives to be installed behind the same controller, providing tiered storage within a single enclosure, said Frank Harbist, vice president and general manager of storage, software and ILM for HP. The list price without hard drives is $8,995.

Carl Wolfston, director of Headlands Associates, a Pleasanton, Calif., HP solution provider, said having two tiers of storage within a single array makes sense for some customers. It also makes it easier to engage prospects in conversations about different classes of storage, he said.

HP also unveiled the Ultrium 960 LTO-3 tape drive, with an Ultra320 SCSI interface and WORM-compatible tape cartridges, said Rick Luttrall, chief technology strategist for HP's Nearline Storage Division. The tape drive is due to ship this week priced starting at $5,549.

Also new are lower-cost versions of HP's Ultra Density Optical (UDO) jukebox priced starting at $7,975.

HP is tying its hard-drive, optical-drive and tape-drive products into a tiered storage solution with version 5.5 of its StorageWorks Data Protector software. The software virtualizes the tape backup process to treat a backup data set as an object, making it easier to automate backups and to move data sets from disk to optical to tape and back, Luttrall said.

StorageWorks 5.5 also supports backup mirroring, under which backups can be mirrored to a second target at the same time as an original backup for remote archiving.