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HP Drives Down Cost of Storage Area Networking

HP Drives Down Cost of Storage Area Networking

PHOENIX -- Storage Networking World, April 5, 2004 -- HP today announced a numbers of storage solutions designed to help customers drive down storage area network (SAN) cost and simplify SAN integration and management based on industry standards.

Among the new offerings are lower-cost-per-gigabyte, high-capacity Fibre Channel disk drives for the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) family designed to reduce SAN cost while increasing flexibility and investment protection. According to HP, by combining higher capacity, lower-cost disk drive mechanisms with a Fibre Channel interface, the new drives address the growing need for organizations to cost-effectively store less critical or infrequently accessed information in a more economical fashion.

"HP is broadening the appeal of storage area networks by eliminating some of the barriers to entry," said Bob Schultz, senior vice president and general manager of HP's Network Storage Solutions. "For instance, the ability to offer tiered storage within a single storage system and enable simplified integration through support of industry standards lowers the price for SAN implementations -- making them more attractive to a broader range of customers."

In collaboration with Seagate, HP also plans to introduce a new class of disk drives, called Fibre Attached Technology Adapted, which will be the first in the industry to offer customers the flexibility to segment reference data (such as archived e-mail) as well as mission-critical data (such as financial transactions) between lower-cost-per-gigabyte drives and high-performance drives within a single storage system based on application performance and availability requirements.

"Fibre Channel drives and technology are traditionally deployed in the high-end enterprise space where having the highest levels of performance and reliability are critical elements in a system," said Brian Dexheimer, executive vice president of worldwide global marketing for Seagate. "By using more cost-effective Fibre Channel drives, IT managers will have the capability to run their mission-critical data together with their basic reference data and use the same common Fibre Channel infrastructure. This enables easier system management along with added flexibility and scalability."