HP Discover: HP Ugrades Primary And Backup Storage

Hewlett-Packard has launched a revitalised storage portfolio at its HP Discover event in Frankfurt – and gave its Autonomy subsidiary a major role in the announcement despite the legal wrangle surrounding the price it paid for the company.

The announcement, made at the HP Discover 2012 event in Frankfurt, majored on simplicity. Storage boss David Scott, who previously promised “storage liposuction”, is now offering “polymorphous simplicity”, not to be mistaken for polymorphous perversity, instead of “fragmented complexity”. There were three major parts: the company has new StoreServ 7000 boxes which bring high-end SANs to mid-range busineses, there is a new unified StoreOnce product for backup (also known as “data protection”), and there are new StoreAll systems for big data and cloud services.

HP storage excitement

“We are taking our entire enhanced Tier 1 functionality, and for the first time bringing it down to the mid-range in the HP Storeserv 7000,” said a clearly excited Scott (pictured). The 7200 starts at under $20,000, he said.

Because the company now has a unified storage product family, administration can be reduced by 90 percent, he said.

The StoreServ product can use all SSDs for high performance, and can perform more than 320,000 IOPs per second.

The new StoreOnce architecture has client-side de-duplication  – which in simple terms means the sensible approach of eliminating duplicated data before saving it, and stores data five times faster than competing products from Data Domain, said Scott.

The StoreAll product featured some impressive claims, including apparently carrying out searches 100,000 times faster than previous products, thanks to technology from HP Labs. This product is also closely integrated with the Autonomy product, and ex-Autonomy executive Brian Weiss, now head of information governance at HP, was on-hand to detail the benefits.

“Autonomy IDOL gives a human-like understanding of human-data, and now a large part of that work can be offloaded to the storage,”

Despite publicly writing down the value of Autonomy, HP still valued it highly and would would be integrating it into more of its announcements, said Weiss.

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