Tuesday, 13 June 2006

HP Expands Storage Portfolio to Help Businesses Capitalise on Information

Hewlett Packard has launched an information cycle management (ILM) product for delivering storage products, software and services that enable customers to better capitalise on their business information. The company claims the offerings will help businesses accelerate data archiving and retrieval, increase worker productivity...

Hewlett Packard (HP) has launched an information cycle management (ILM) product for delivering storage products, software and services that enable customers to better capitalise on their business information. The company claims the offerings will help businesses accelerate data archiving and retrieval, increase worker productivity and simplify the protection of their customers’ critical data.

“Businesses challenged with the need to easily and cost-effectively manage ever-increasing amounts of data can use our expanded ILM portfolio to put their information to work for competitive advantage,” claims Frank Harbist, vice president and general manager, ILM and Storage Software, StorageWorks Division, HP.

New Products and services in HP’s ILM portfolio include:

• HP StorageWorks Continuous Information Capture delivers continuous data protection without affecting database or application performance and it shortens roll-back time by close to four times compared to traditional data protection solutions.
  
• HP StorageWorks 200 Virtualisation System is an in-band appliance that virtualises multi-vendor arrays to simplify heterogeneous data migration between arrays.
  
• HP StorageWorks Reference Information Manager for Files enables continuous capture of files stored on Windows desktops or file servers.
  
• HP StorageWorks Application Recovery Manager enables instant recovery of Microsoft Exchange and SQL application databases in the event of disaster or corruption.
  
• Cisco MDS 9513 and Multilayer Director Switch delivers high availability and support for multilayer switching solutions.

The portfolio also offers an array of advanced products:

• StorageWorks Reference Information Storage System is an active-archiving solution that helps customers store, index and rapidly retrieve reference data. The HP StorageWorks Optical Jukeboxes with 30 GB Ultra Density Optical drives provides more, permanent, nearline storage at an affordable price.
  
• StorageWorks Reference Information Manager for Databases manages accelerating data growth by relocating infrequently used data to an easily accessed archive database.
  
• OpenView Storage Data Protector is a highly scalable data protection software that automates backup and recovery from disk or tape. Version 6.0 significantly reduces time and resources required to perform backups by enabling full backup creation through pointers, eliminating the need to run regular full backups by consolidating incremental backups.

Fig. 1: Storage Array Systems

The volume of information continues to explode and solutions to maintain and capitalise on the information have become a must to keep a competitive edge from rivals. HP claims with ILM solutions customers can extend information management beyond data centre.