HP grows converged storage line-up
HP has brought out new products within its converged infrastructure range of IT hardware.
The update, announced at HP Discover in Las Vegas on Monday, sees the hardware giant add two further products to its lineup and update a pre-existing virtualisation array.
The products are all part of HP's converged infrastructure strategy, which seeks to meld HP networking, servers and storage to create products that contain equipment all made by a single vendor, excluding the underlying processors which are typically Intel or AMD.
"EMC and NetApp simply don't have the server and networking DNA to do this," David Scott, general manager of HP storage, said. "If the world is moving to infrastructure based on industry standard servers, HP has a clear advantage."
HP introduced the BladeSystem-derived HP X5000 G2 Network Storage Systems file server and the unstructured-data storing X9000 Ibrix Network Storage System. It also announced the fifth generation of its P6000 enterprise virtualisation appliance (EVA).
HP gained the underlying technology for the X9000 by acquiring Ibrix in mid-2009.
When asked whether HP's dreams of a converged infrastructure could be dampened by competing products from coalitions of various specialists, such as the Virtual Computing Environment group of Cisco, EMC and VMware's vBlock appliances, HP was optimistic.
"[In] VCE, everyone's going to back up to the interest in their own [respective] company," Craig Nunes, HP's director of worldwide storage told ZDNet UK. "[HP's] idea is that it all happens to be from one company and is totally upgradable."
Data mining
In the future, consumers can expect the company to produce hardware and software packages designed to better mine and locate unstructured data, Nunes said.
He said hardware will be designed for companies that have a lot of archived data that they expect to make use of for future projects.
For example, HP hopes to build hardware for companies such as Dreamworks who make use of pre-existing assets on new films and so need hardware that can "ferret data out of the content depot," Nunes said. To this end, HP's researchers are working on technologies to render search functions in parallel that, at the moment, are computed lineally, he said.