HP Introduces New Storage Systems Based On Technology From 3PAR Acquisition

HP has introduced a new storage system based on technology from its $2.35 billion acquisition of 3PAR storage in 2010, as well as new Peer Motion software for managing federated storage environments on both virtual and cloud computing IT resources.

The HP P10000 3PAR Storage Systems come in two models, the V400 and V800, and are sold alongside two legacy 3PAR storage systems, the 3PAR F-Class and T-Class. The V-Class models are optimized to run in IT-as-a-Service environments, where IT is a private cloud that departments within an enterprise access on a pay-as-you-go basis. The systems enable storage federation in which multiple storage assets operate as one entity for increased enterprise agility. This architecture consolidates unpredictable workloads without having to run them in separate storage partitions.

A limitation of previous generation storage systems is that they are "a single workload beast," says Craig Nunes, director of marketing for HP Storage. "They are great with a single workload, but if you try to run transactional data, like a billing application, at the same time as something very sequential, like analytics or backup, a sequential application really slows down a transactional application," Nunes adds.

Where the value of the 3PAR acquisition to HP really shows is in the ability of the HP P10000 3PAR Systems to blend those diverse workloads, he says. The new storage systems also offer 1.5 times greater port connectivity and disk resources, and up to three times greater performance for sequential workloads, compared with previous generation 3PAR systems. They also do autonomical load balancing within the array with one click when new storage resources are added.

The HP P10000 systems are available now starting at $288,633 from HP or one of its channel partners. HP sees demand for storage virtualization in research from IDC, which estimates that by 2012, 85% of new enterprise software applications will be specifically designed to be accessed from the cloud.

The Peer Motion management software enables users to transparently move application workloads between disk systems in virtual or cloud computing environments. It also moves application data to storage with available capacity to avoid the cost of overprovisioning new storage capacity that may not be needed.

Peer Motion comes in two versions, one for 3PAR-based storage and another for LeftHand Networks-based storage. LeftHand is another storage vendor acquired by HP, for $360 million in 2008.

The Peer Motion software helps streamline some of the processes of storage setup and data migration, which can be a time-consuming and a difficult task for storage IT professionals, Nunes says. "Data migration requires down time and a lot of planning. Often times, you’ve got to bring in services from your vendor to kind of get through it, and what we’re saying is you do not need that with this Peer Motion approach to storage," he says.

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