12:55 PM -- In its latest storage announcement, HP focused on helping its customers improve their storage infrastructure economics. In the current economic climate, HP is faced with the challenge of trying to convince customers that spending money on its products is a better economic decision than just cutting spending.
Overall, HP believes customers should revisit how they produce, distribute, and consume technology resources. To achieve this, HP describes three basic IT strategies that customers can pursue: 1) standardize, optimize, and automate; 2) prioritize for business value; and 3) deploy flexible sourcing. Among the economic benefits that can result from these actions are reduced operational costs and elimination of waste.
From a storage perspective, HP focused on the "standardize, optimize and automate" action. The announcement had three major product components.
SAN Virtualization Services Platform -- The goal of HP's SVSP is to provide storage virtualization to improve SAN economics. Through the centralized management of virtual storage pools and a broad set of data services, SVSP enables the pooling and sharing of storage resources with the expected direct customer economic benefits of improving efficiency, simplifying operations, and lowering TCO. In fact, HP makes some impressive claims with regard to SVSP: improving asset utilization by 300 percent, saving on administrative costs by managing three times more storage and two times more servers per administrator, and improving operational efficiency by shrinking backup times by up to 80 percent. These numbers should make customers sit up and take notice.
HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array -- HP also announced two new products at the high end of its EVA family -- the EVA6400 and the EVA 8400. EVA is HP's home-grown storage line, targeted at mid-market and enterprise-class customers who do not need the very high-end XP product line. HP claims five nines availability for the EVA architectures, which translates into unplanned downtime of only a few minutes per year.
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