Hewlett-Packard has introduced new storage products and services that it hopes will allow customers to successfully weather the economic downturn and emerge from the economic crises stronger than ever.

Kyle Fitze, director of marketing for storage platforms for HP StorageWorks, says HP’s new products and services focus on customers’ needs to optimize and automate their data centers and storage environments to squeeze every last drop of performance possible out of their infrastructure.

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To that end, Fitze says, HP will introduce new StorageWorks SAN Virtualization solutions, including two new enterprise virtual arrays (EVAs), enhancements to HP’s SAN virtualization service platform and new features for its DataProtector software. 

“We’re introducing solutions for our partners that will help their customers address storage pain points that arise as a result of server virtualization,” says Fitze. “Solution providers will have solutions that increase customers’ ability to scale and provision new storage capacity, manage their data stores and better protect them.”  

Fitze says HP will replace the 6100 and 8100 series EVAs with new 6400 and 8400 models, respectively. The new EVAs integrate new controllers and disk interfaces with twice as much cache capacity and double the number of disks supported, which gives solution providers more value for the price.

The new EVAs also include built-in virtualization capabilities and new tier management capabilities that incorporate a solid-state disk (SSD) tier for customers’ most critical data.

“We can now create a ‘high performance’ tier using SSDs,” says Fitze. “This is ideal for customers who need to store transaction logs, quickly access databases or run high-performance applications.”

HP also announced enhancements to its HP DataProtector software and services, which provides a wide variety of backup options and supports deduplication and other backup services for all physical and virtual environments, Fitze says.

The new version, Data Protector 6.1, offers new security and encryption management capabilities as well as integration of virtual library systems and deduplication to reduce capacity needed for customers to back up their data.