HP also introduced HP Storage Works 600 Modular Disk System, direct-connect SAS storage for its HP BladeSystem. It lets storage administrators easily allocate storage to blade servers so it looks like local storage, rather than networked storage. "We are redefining direct-attached storage," says Lenore Adam, a product manager in the blade storage group of HP.
The MDS600 can hold up to 70 1-TB drives and up to six can be connected to a single BladeSystem. For customers needing a lot of capacity, HP said the system can scale up to 420 TB of storage that can be allocated across 16 BladeSystem servers.
"This is simple and straightforward storage that a server administrator can handle and will be good for unstructured data," Adam says. HP introduced the SAS switch last year and now is adding connectivity to the MDS600.
The storage announcements were made when HP introduced the latest move in its "adaptive infrastructure" data center initiative, which the company has been pushing for several years now. Company executives were quick to point out that all of the newly announced products are available for purchase today, "unlike our competition," a not-so-subtle slap at Cisco, which announced but didn't roll out its new data center server products last month. HP, of course, offers a full menu of products for data centers, from servers to storage to its ProCurve networking switches.
"This has been a multiyear trip for us. The goal is to blade everything, virtually connect everything, and automate everything," says Jim Ganthier, vice president of infrastructure software and blades at HP. "IT departments should have pools of resources and should be able to reach into those pools, take what they need, and when they are done put those resources back in the pool for reuse. There is no magic involved. This is built using proved, converged infrastructure."
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