HP Sharpens Storage offerings

Organizations interested in DAS or SAN solutions now have a deeper pool of options. Tuesday at the Storage Networking World conference in Orlando Florida, HP announced several new products aimed primarily at SMBs looking to expand their storage horizons.

At this week’s Storage Networking World HP unveiled a number of storage options for SMBs, including a dedicated storage blade and a SAN in a box.

The biggest splash surrounded its storage blade news. Beginning next month, directed-attached storage (DAS) will be available in a server blades form factor with HP’s first dedicated storage blade.

The HP StorageWorks SB40c is designed to be “more of an SMB play, particularly for retail or remote locations,” Steve Gillaspy, group manager, HP BladeSystem told ServerWatch.

It is not meant to supplant a traditional storage infrastructure, but rather to provide storage in situations where having an array or a SAN on-site is not possible or necessary, but more local storage is sought, Gillaspy said.

Built solely from industry-standard components, including small form factor Serial Attached SCSI drives, the SB40c adds up to 876 gigabytes of DAS capacity to each blade within an HP BladeSystem c-Class enclosure.

Each SB40c consists of six disk drives with an internal RAID (ranging from RAID 0 to RAID 5/6, Gillaspy said) and sits next to a server blade, as that holds the necessary array controller. Thus, each of the storage blades requires a one-to-one relationship with the server blades in the c-Class cabinet. Up to eight SB40c can run in each 16-blade enclosure, Gillaspy said.

In addition, the storage blade offers simplified and automated storage and server management via HP Systems Insight Manager and its Integrated Lights-Out tools.

The offering is being described as part of HP’s mission to “blade everything” in the data center.

HP also announced at this time the StorageWorks EVA4000 SAN Starter Kit, a storage solution designed for SMBs ready to move beyond DAS, Scott McIntyre, vice president of software and customer product management at Emulex, told ServerWatch.

The starter kit is a complete out-of-the-box solution that contains everything from Brocade switches to host bus adaptors and software from Emulex to a centralized interface that automates provisioning for Windows 2003 hosts.

The EVA4000 SAN Starter Kit is available now and runs in both Windows and Linux environments. It is priced starting at around $33,000. The SB40c blade will be available in mid-November starting at $1,599.