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The widest storage portfolio on the planet

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DQC Bureau
New Update

Post-merger the new HP says it is now deploying nine TB a month of storage

globally. Its enterprise arrays alone have over a petabyte of installed capacity

so far.

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Speaking at its enterprise network storage architecture (ENSA) Asia-Pacific

conference in Singapore, Neal Clapper, VP of Online Storage at HP´s Network

Storage Solutions says that storage was no longer a peripheral. "It´s

moved to central status, while servers are often becoming peripheral!" she

adds.

HP was a low-profile player in this area in the 1990s, largely through its

tape backup products and disk arrays that have shipped with HP servers for well

over a decade. More recently, it ramped up its enterprise arrays and

virtualization products.

Post 1990s, a big step was the re-orienting of its popular OpenView network

management software toward storage management. OpenView´s storage area manager

(SAM) now includes capabilities of discovery, assignment and access control,

performance and capacity analysis, service levels and metering/charge-back,

replication (for remote mirroring), data protection and media management.

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HP´s enterprise storage solutions tended to focus on the higher-capacity

data-center needs. Now, the merger with Compaq brings in a wide range of storage

solutions, giving it an end-to-end range.

"It´s all about storage management," says Clapper. "The

secret ingredient in storage is storage management. We´re building storage

intelligence into our devices, into the fabric," she added.

As far as trends in storage management is concerned, they do vary by

geography. In India, for instance, direct-attached storage still dominates over

85 percent of large enterprises, according to surveys by Dataquest in India.

Storage area networks and consolidation have made very slow inroads, thanks to

infrastructure issues, primarily the lack of cheap, high-availability bandwidth

across the country, as well as the funds squeeze in India over the past year

when SAN really grew worldwide. This should change in late 2003, as the new,

private intercity fiber networks light up, offering cheaper bandwidth, and

enterprises deploy data and voice applications across them in India.

And the unorganized nature of storage so far has meant complex networks with

different systems and software, within the same enterprise. This has required

partnerships for all storage players. HP, for instance, partners with not just

the major pure-storage players like Legato, Veritas and EMC or applications

companies like Microsoft, SAP and People-Soft, but also systems competitors Sun,

IBM, Dell. Clapper says that because of these partnerships and by deploying open

standards "we can now manage over 70 percent of the storage on the

planet".

PRASANTO ROY



(CNS)

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