8 Must-See Products And Solutions Unveiled At HP GPC 2015

HP Expands Reach Into Enterprise, SMB Infrastructure Market

The move by Hewlett-Packard to split into two companies is not slowing down HP's introduction of new server, storage and other data center technologies, if last week's HP Global Partner Conference is any indication.

On Nov. 1, the enterprise infrastructure part of HP, including its Helion cloud business, will be known as Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. The rest of HP, centered primarily around its print and PC business, will be known as HP Inc.

In the meantime, HP continues to roll out new storage, server, and management products and solutions. Turn the page to see what HP is doing in the run up to its historic split.

HP OneView: Management Console For All Server, Storage, Networking

HP expanded its data center management capabilities with new partner training and services for its HP OneView software for managing server, storage and networking via a single console.

HP OneView lets customers do things like create server profiles and images, define storage volumes in 3PAR arrays for virtual machines, deduplicate such profiles, and get information on power use and data center ambient temperatures, all via a single console. A ReST API allows plugging into other management consoles.

Customers purchasing an HP c7000 blade server chassis also will have the option of buying a new starter pack of 16 HP OneView licenses. That starter pack is priced at $13,783, which represents a savings of about $1,000 over purchasing the licenses separately.

HP Wants Partners To Handle ConvergedSystem 700 Services

HP wants its solution provider partners to take over the services related to integrating the ConvergedSystem 700 converged infrastructure offering.

Until now, HP has packaged the storage, server, networking and other components of a ConvergedSystem solution in its own facilities before shipping them directly to customers' sites, where HP-trained people at the customer site do the actual deployment. Now ServiceOne partners do on-site delivery and deployment of ConvergedSystem 700 solutions, which can be assembled by, and shipped from, Avnet.

Flash For MSA Storage

HP enhanced its MSA family of SMB storage arrays with the addition of SSDs for use as a low-cost, high-performance read cache. The new SSD option, which lists starting at $1,599, is in addition to the standard flash cache now shipping in about 25 percent of all MSA arrays sold.

Turning StoreVirtual Virtual Appliance Into Hardware

HP expanded its StoreVirtual scale-out storage line with the introduction of its new StoreVirtual 4335 hybrid flash array. The StoreVirtual 4335 features the same user interface, command line interface and data services as HP's StoreVirtual virtual storage appliance, but comes as an integrated hardware appliance with three 400-GB SSDs and seven 900-GB spinning drives.

New Hardware, Virtual Versions Of HP StoreOnce Line

Also new from HP are a couple of additions to the company's StoreOnce line of disk-based data protection and deduplication appliances.

New to the line is the StoreOnce 2900 with between 15.5 TBs and 31.5 TBs of raw capacity. That puts it between HP's existing StoreOnce 2700, which starts at 5.5 TBs of raw capacity, and the StoreOnce 4500, which can have from 24 TBs to 124 TBs. It can either be used as a complete SMB backup appliance or as a replication target for other StoreOnce solutions.

HP also introduced the StoreOnce Virtual Storage Appliance, or VSA, which runs on VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V or KVM hypervisors on industry-standard hardware to provide a low-cost data protection appliance with raw capacity of up to 50 TBs.

New Versions Of StoreEasy NAS Line

HP introduced three new models in its StoreEasy NAS family. The HP StoreEasy 1450 starts at $5,497 with a minimum of four 1-TB SATA hard drives, but scales to up to 24 TBs total in 1U. The HP StoreEasy 1650 maxes out at 72 TBs of raw internal capacity in a 2U chassis, but starts with eight 2-TB hard drives. The HP StoreEasy 1850, which starts at $14,657 with eight 1.2-TB SAS hard drives, expands to up to 43.2 TBs in 2U.

HP also is bundling its StoreEasy NAS appliance and its LiveVault archiving service as a Backup-as-a-Service offering. Starting price is $7,500, which includes an HP StoreEasy 1450 appliance combined with a 2-TB license for the LiveVault cloud.

Entry-Level ProLiant Tower Server

The HP ProLiant ML110 is the latest in HP's Gen9 servers, and is an upgrade to the previous ML110 G7. HP enhanced the ProLiant ML110 with more memory, disk storage and IO expansion, and optimized the server's compute capabilities for SMB physical and virtual workloads.

The HP ProLiant ML110 is scheduled to ship on April 1 with a list price of about $1,000.

Really Entry-Level ProLiant Tower Server

The HP ProLiant ML10 v2 is an updated version of the ML10 introduced in 2014. The ML10 v2 sits between HP's previous Gen8 server and the new Gen9 servers in that it uses the new Intel Haswell vs. the older Ivy Bridge platform, as well as HP's new Smart Array, but still lacks some components, including DDR4 SDRAM memory.

In addition to the new Haswell platform and Smart Array, the ProLiant ML10 v2, compared to the original ML10, also has six hard drives vs. four, and two Ethernet ports vs. 1

The HP ProLiant ML10 v2 is slated to ship in mid-April with a list price starting at about $300.