In a series of products and upgrades to be introduced on Tuesday, HP will roll out higher capacity virtualized storage arrays with new features such as virtual RAID 6 and a solid-state drive option. The company is also introducing storage virtualization software that works with more third-party devices, and an improved backup platform. The rollout is part of a broader set of steps on Tuesday to help customers cut costs during the recession and prepare for competitiveness in the future.

Though enterprises may have fewer resources to work with in hard times, their need for storage capacity is expected to continue growing. HP says it can help them make better use of their IT resources through management software that takes less work, as well as virtualization technology that can increase the utilization of existing storage capacity. With virtualization and easy-to-use management software built in, the new StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) products can cut storage administrative costs by half compared with traditional arrays from competitors such as EMC and NetApp, Fitze said.

On the hardware side, HP is introducing the Enterprise Virtual Array 6400 and 8400 platforms. Replacing the EVA6100 and EVA8100 units, the new arrays can accommodate more storage -- as many as 320 drives -- and larger caches, as big as 20G bytes on the EVA 8400.

One added option on the new EVA units is the option of adding solid-state drives (SSDs) for fast access to key information stores such as database logs, said Kyle Fitze, director of marketing for HP's storage platforms division. Customers will be able to integrate multiple SSDs as large as 72G bytes, he said.

HP is also introducing VRAID 6, a virtual implementation of the RAID 6 standard, which sets up dual parity for every logical volume on an array. RAID 6 lets the array keep working with no lost data even if two disks fail, Fitze said.