Webinar replay tracks newest HP storage
March 29, 2011
HP has poured billions into its storage business over the last two years. While HP 3000-ready products are still tied to the XP line of disks, there's a huge array of products that are a full generation newer. These are well-fitted for Windows server installations, not to mention Unix. Migrators should be tracking these options while they configure their target platforms. At left is the p4800 G2 SAN, a brand-new array that HP says is integrated with its blade servers.
Given these new players, it's not easy to embrace such a broad scope of products. We've found a WebEx webinar replay that does a good job of explaining the differences between 3PAR utility cloud offerings and HP's own brands of disk. It looks worth the time to review it, even if the audio is a little sketchy in places.
"HP Storage: The Path Forward" was hosted by the Connect user group earlier this month. The PowerPoint slide deck can be downloaded separately from reviewing the streamed WebEx presentation. (You will need to be a Connect member to access this, but if you're working on a migration and don't belong yet, it's inexpensive enough to simply join.)
The commentary attached to the slides is extensive, much more so than lots of slide decks. You could almost make an article out of it, but we're checking in with HP's Lee Johns, who led the webinar, before you can read it here.
HP P4800 BladeSystem SANs are absolutely the most efficient SAN for HP BladeSystem as they utilize the full set of BladeSystem capabilities. HP can uniquely leverage its huge supply chain and market leadership in blade servers to now deliver a scalable high performance SAN for HP BladeSystem at a significantly lower entry point vs the competition.
Placing clustered P4000 nodes inside the shared infrastructure of the BladeSystem c-Class chassis eliminates the dedicated external storage networking typically associated with disk arrays… reducing networking costs by 65 percent while the common power and cooling infrastructure cuts those costs by over 30 percent. As an iSCSI array, the Flex-10 networking infrastructure of BladeSystem provides increased agility from virtual machine all the way to disk spindle without ever leaving the BladeSystem.
Before these feeds and speeds, the webinar also makes good cases for upgrading storage to comply with the fresh needs of expanding IT. Definitely worthwhile, if you want to be able to compare storage for your migration platform with options from EMC and other vendors.