Hewlett-Packard Co. is expected to officially announce a flurry of new products and upgrades to existing storage arrays and software at its annual storage users show on Monday -- moves analysts say could boost the company"s standing against market leader EMC Corp.
The company is also expected to add a new services program at the HP Americas StorageWorks Conference 2005.
"I think they"ll be able to recapture market share with the portfolio as a whole," said Nancy Hurley, a storage analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group Inc. in Milford, Mass.
Hurley applauded plans by HP to unveil its first enterprise class network-attached storage (NAS) array, which is based on the PolyServe Matrix Server application from PolyServe Inc. in Beaverton, Ore. "We"re very big on PolyServe"s capabilities," said Hurley.
The new HP StorageWorks Enterprise File Services (EFS) Clustered Gateway is based on a clustered file system that can expand to 8.2 petabytes of storage. A single cluster supports up to 16 nodes and 512 Linux file systems.
HP is also introducing its first virtual tape library, the HP StorageWorks 6000 Virtual Library System. The new system is based on the HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Array and can emulate 16 separate libraries and 64 virtual drives or 64 server connections. The midrange box has a capacity of 2.5TB to 10TB, according to Bob Wilson, vice president of Nearline storage at HP, and is integrated with HP"s Command View Tape Library Software. That integration allows users to manage all HP enterprise tape libraries and virtual library systems from a single interface.
Kevin Donnellan, director of enterprise infrastructure services for the Screen Actors Guild-Producers Pension Health Plan in Burbank, Calif., said he will likely kick the tires on a StorageWorks 6000 Virtual Library System in order to get his backup window under control. Donnellan now has two storage-area networks built on two HP EVA 5000 storage arrays with a total of 16TB of capacity.
"Backing that up is a chore. We don"t have time to do full backups," he said. Donnellan said he"s hoping a virtual tape library will cut the time it takes to back up his primary storage by 75 percent.
In addition to the other upcoming announcements, HP also said it has added a new midrange Enterprise Virtual Array family. The EVA 4000, 6000 and 8000 have up to 72TB capacity and twice the cache of previous EVA arrays.
The EVA 4000 has 2GB of cache per dual array controllers and scales from eight to 56 hard drives. The EVA 6000 also has 2GB cache per controller and scales from 16 and 112 hard drives. The EVA 8000 comes with 4GB of cache in each pair of controllers and scales from eight to 240 hard drives.
HP will also introduce the Enterprise Modular Library, a midrange, rack-mounted, LTO-3 tape library that scales to 16 drives, 440 tape slots and up to 350TB of compressed data.
The HP services to be unveiled include a package for information life-cycle management consulting and configuration. The ILM services include a discovery workshop, which determines what an IT shop has and what it needs to achieve a tiered storage infrastructure, and a business requirements service that recommends technical solutions to meet business needs.