HP Unveils New Storage, Server Technologies For Mission-Critical Apps
The new products target customers looking to build converged infrastructures as a way to improve the availability of their applications, said Katie Curtin-Mestre, director of software planning and marketing for business critical systems at HP.
"Building a better foundation for application service delivery with converged infrastructures is important for customers," Curtin-Mestre said. "They're building converged infrastructures not for converged infrastructures sake but for their applications."
Part of that foundation includes consolidating mission-critical storage into fewer platforms via its new StorageWorks P9500 Disk Array as a way to run business applications across thousands of virtual servers, said Tom Joyce, vice president of marketing, strategy, and operations for HP StorageWorks.
The StorageWorks P9500 Disk Array is HP's OEM version of Hitachi Data Systems' new Virtual Storage Platform, or VSP, line of arrays, which was also introduced on Monday.
The P9500 includes HP's SmartTier software, which takes advantage of the granular tiering capabilities of the VSP while adding some of the virtualization capabilities of HP's EVA storage platform, Joyce said
"The EVA provides virtualization within the array, allowing customers to virtualize storage with about one-third the number of people required with other arrays," Joyce said. "It provides six nines of reliability while letting customers grow from six hard drives to 2,048 drives without disruption."
The P9500 also includes meter-based licensing, which varies the license cost of capacity according to the actual capacity which is needed, letting customers treat storage as an operating expense instead of a capital expense, Joyce said. Also new from HP is the HP 9000 Application Performance Extender software which lets customers to dynamically dedicate a slice of server and storage resources to specific mission-critical applications as a way of isolating them from other applications, Joyce said.
"As customers consolidate their server and storage resources, they will have business-critical applications running on the same frames as other applications," he said. "We want to make sure that, if a problem occurs with an application, it doesn't impact the execution of another application across both servers and storage."
On the software side, HP introduced new HP-9000 Containers as part of its HP-UX 11i v3 Unix operating system. The HP-9000 Containers virtualize the workloads of legacy HP-9000 servers to run on its Integrity line of Unix-based servers, Joyce said.
HP also enhanced its Serviceguard mission-critical software, which maintains continuous service availability and prevents revenue loss caused by downtime, with the ability to integrate Oracle's e-Business Suite, Curtin-Mestre said.
"e-Business Suite is very complex, and has many interconnected components," she said. "With our new extensions, we reduce the integration from 30 days to two days."