HP announced a number of new products today designed to lower power costs and boost security.
The company said its “green” storage technology can cut storage array power and cooling costs in data centers in half. Introduced at the HP Americas StorageWorks Conference in Las Vegas, HP’s new Adaptive Infrastructure offerings include thin provisioning and performance enhancements for the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) family, tape drives based on the LTO 4 standard, new DAT 160 tape drives for small and medium businesses, and an HP StorageWorks tape product developed for HP BladeSystem c-Class enclosures.
Citing StorageIO Group, HP said storage accounts for 37 to 40 percent of overall data center energy usage from hardware (see Storage Power and Cooling Issues Heat Up).
“These environmentally responsible storage products will help address two key areas that our customers care about: saving money and conserving energy,” stated Dave Roberson, senior vice president and general manager of HP’s StorageWorks Division.
HP said its StorageWorks EVA4100, 6100 and 8100 midrange disk arrays improve power efficiency by as much as 45 percent over their predecessors while boosting performance by as much as 24 percent.
Employing EVA Dynamic Capacity Management (DCM), Vsnap and FATA disk drives, the new EVAs will optimize hard drive utilization, eliminate unnecessary HDD storage disk purchases, shrink carbon footprints and manage IT resources and storage provisioning tasks, HP said.
Similar to thin provisioning, DCM software can double capacity utilization rates and delay the purchase of additional hard drives, the company said. It will leverage the new virtual disk service (VDS) volume shrink feature in the upcoming Microsoft Windows Server 2008 to continuously monitor storage utilization rates and automatically grow or shrink host volumes to match application data needs.
Citing the Clipper Group, HP said tape is the most energy-efficient storage technology for long-term data retention, requiring neither power nor cooling. HP said its StorageWorks LTO-4 Ultrium1840 is its highest capacity, fastest and most secure tape backup, consuming up to 50 percent fewer watts per gigabyte than previous generations. LTO-4 technology and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256-bit data encryption protect user data from unauthorized access if cartridges are lost or stolen in transport.
LTO-4 Ultrium1840 drives include HP Data Protector Express Single Server edition software with hardware encryption support. The drives will be integrated and available in HP StorageWorks MSL, EML and ESL E-Series Tape Libraries.
The HP Ultrium 448c Tape Blade is a new half-height tape storage blade that provides data protection for HP BladeSystem c-Class servers and storage blades. Aimed at customers not connected to a storage area network (SAN), the Ultrium 448c provides direct-attached data protection for both half-height and full-height c-Class server blades and uses the HP Dynamic Power Saving mode to save on power requirements. It also supports HP One-Button Disaster Recovery for quick recovery of operating system, applications and data from the latest backup set in the event of a hard drive failure.
For use with HP ProLiant 100 and 300 series servers and available with either a SCSIor USB interface, the DAT 160 delivers backup speeds of up to 50 GB per hour and offers up to 160 GB of capacity on a single cartridge, twice the capacity and performance of other DAT drives, the company said.
At its Technology Forum, also in Las Vegas, HP unveiled a new comprehensive security offering to protect data, resources and validate regulatory compliance across the entire IT infrastructure, from the desktop to the data center. The HP Secure Advantage portfolio of servers, storage, software and services helps customers securely share information, improve identity management and compliance controls, ensure business continuity and defend against network attacks, the company said.