Hewlett-Packard is putting its own twist on the data center of the future with today’s launch of the HP Converged Infrastructure Architecture and a set of associated services and partner offerings that create a virtualized, on-demand data center.

HP’s approach calls for the complete virtualization of resources in the data center and unification under common management. It is a concept that many in the industry believe is the way of the future, including the Virtual Computing Environment coalition – a joint effort created by EMC, Cisco and VMware to provide virtualized building blocks (Vblocks) as the preferred foundation for next generation data centers.

The HP Converged Infrastructure Architecture integrates and virtualizes compute, storage, networking and management resources based on several HP technologies, most notably BladeSystem Matrix, FlexFabric and Virtual Resource Pools.

Using HP Virtual Resource Pool technology, modular standards-based systems can be provisioned on-demand to support enterprise, cloud and high performance computing applications, according to Lee Johns, HP’s marketing director for unified storage.

The underlying capacity for Virtual Resource Pools is served up by HP’s StorageWorks systems, including the new StorageWorks X9000 Network Storage System family, a series of scale-out systems based on technology from the acquisition of Ibrix.

Johns says the HP X9000 system is capable of scaling to 16PB of capacity in a single namespace or virtual file system capacity for a cost in the range of $1.50/GB.

The X9000 is comprised of three models. The X9300 Network Storage Gateway is a 2U rack-mount system that brings scale-out gateway file services to HP or third-party arrays or SANs. The X9320 Network Storage Systems represent the midrange, while the X9720 Network Storage System is capable of storing petabytes of file-based data for expanding applications.

Also part of the Converged Infrastructure offering, the new StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform (SVSP) version 3.0 includes a back-end LUN provisioning service. This feature automatically creates SVSP storage pools from capacity provisioned across multiple StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Arrays (EVAs).Johns claims customers also can improve capacity utilization through the SVSP’s ability to configure virtualized pools of storage and the application of thin provisioning.

The StorageWorks SVSP v3.0 is available now with a list price starting at $31,032 for a for an entry-level 1TB configuration that includes hardware plus SVSP virtual machine (VM) license.

Rounding out the storage news, HP is about to ship the StorageWorks Cluster Extension EVA software integrated with Microsoft Hyper-V Live Migration. The Cluster Extension allows users to dynamically move both applications and storage across the data center for disaster recovery purposes.

StorageWorks Cluster Extension EVA software with Microsoft Hyper-V Live Migration will be available later this month for $5,280.

Similar Posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *