HP’s storage blades for the future!
By Tarry Singh at 25 June, 2009, 12:31 pm
Very interesting indeed. We must not forget HP, IBM are powerhouses that will not take notice of the noises and will work harder on making their vision of being a one-stop-shop a reality. Many others are still trying to find common ground by bunging storage/virtualization/networks together. HP, with it’s ever increasingly popular PODs, will have it all built-in!
The architecture will take cues from the ExDS9100 scale-out filer storage products and LeftHand Networks’ storage virtualisation capabilities. The idea is to replicate in the storage space what has happened with HP servers. There, Veale says, complex and often proprietary rack and tower servers are being replaced with a virtualised bladed server infrastructure that is more energy- and space-efficient, has greater flexibility and lowers server acquisition and running costs.
Storage functions such as data replication or deduplication could be added via software and possibly additional storage processors.
Such a bladed, scale-out, virtualised storage product could suit both small/medium business (SMB) and enterprise requirements but not necessarily the high-end data centre array requirements for bullet-proof data storage, currently met by HP’s XP monolithic arrays. These, Veale thinks, like mainframes, will always be with us, because they offer a high-end level of storage service that modular or post-mdular, scale-out arrays won’t be able to match.
Veale also said that such a next generation storage architecture could be used for cloud storage needs. There would still be a need though, for dedicated storage niche products such as archival storage.
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