Storage consolidation isn't anything new and impacts every organisation; SMB, Mid Market and Enterprise. AMI-Partners in a recent survey asked SMB customers in nine different countries around the world what were the top factors driving their investment in storage. The top three answers were (note that the percentages indicate who answered "Agree Strongly" or "Agree"):
- Growth in storage capacity: 63%
- Replace aging / broken equipment: 48%
- Server / Storage consolidation: 42%
This shows that regardless of how long storage consolidation has been around, it's still a solution customers need. HP has recently refreshed their entry-level storage products. They are announcing enhancements to the following product families:
- HP StorageWorks X310 Data Vault – US & Canada only.
P2000
Back in February, HP announced significant enhancements to the P2000 G3 MSA functionality and several versions that included Fibre Channel, and combo iSCSI/FC controllers. Briefly, here's what HP announced on June 2 for the P2000:
- New P2000 G3 SAS MSA featuring the latest 6Gb SAS. This includes all of the features HP announced in February like 64 snapshots and volume copy licenses included, drive spin down, and more.
- New P2000 G3 SAN Starter kits. There are two new SAN Starter kits. These starter kits simplify the ordering and deployment of a SAN and also offer a lower price than if the components were bought separately.
X1000
HP announced the re-branded X1000 series in 2009. It took the file sharing capabilities of the ProLiant Storage Server family and the file sharing and iSCSI capabilities of the StorageWorks All-in-One Storage System and merged them together into the X1000. So the X1000 is a unified storage solution, with both iSCSI software target to host applications and file sharing. What I think sets the X1000 apart is the HP Automated Storage Manager software or ASM. ASM dramatically simplifies managing the X1000 so you don't need to have storage expertise. Here's a summary of what's new:
- HP ASM has been updated and now even easier to use. You can be up and running in 6 mouse clicks
- New X1500 - a new tower enclosure for customers that don't have rack-server infrastructure.
- X1800 has been enhanced to hold 16 small form factor (SFF) drives - it's 2X the capacity of the previous model in 2U rack space.
Naturally there are other arrays within HP Storageworks such as EVA (P6000) and the P4000 (Lefthand). We will cover these in detail in another post.