LAS VEGAS -- In a bid to reinforce its claim to be the only vendor who can legitimately provide a single-source solution to all of an organization's data-center needs, HP has announced a flurry of new servers, storage products and its first home-grown data dedupe solution. Unveiled at its Tech Forum 2010 as part of the company's Converged Infrastructure blueprint for eliminating IT sprawl, complexity and excess maintenance costs, the products represent a number of industry-firsts in server, storage, network and power management technologies.
The product blitz includes 10 servers, innovations in HP Virtual Connect and HP BladeSystem Matrix, 'unique' power management technologies, and data deduplication software.
“We believe we're ushering in one of the greatest changes in the past two decades... the converged infrastructure,” said Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager, Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking, HP. During his keynote he said this will be the “largest ever” year for product introductions from HP, calling Monday's announcements the most significant server announcements in four years, and the most significant storage announcements in five years.
HP says the industry firsts for the three ProLiant rack-mount servers include memory footprints of up to 2 terabytes, 'self-healing' capabilities that deliver a 200 percent boost in availability, and a consolidation ratio up to 91-to-1. For the seven ProLiant G7 server blades, bragging rights include the industry’s first blade with 1 TB of memory and integrated 10Gb Virtual Connect FlexFabric technology for I/O scalability, capable of supporting up to four times more virtual machines than competitive blades, while requiring 66 percent less hardware.
HP ProLiant DL580 and DL585 G7 rack-optimized servers and the BL465c and BL685c G7 server blades are available now .while the DL980, BL2x220, BL460c, BL490c, BL620c and BL680c G7 servers will be available in the coming months. Prices start at $2,279.
The HP Virtual Connect portfolio has been expanded to deliver automated, wire-once connectivity to any network, eliminating up to 95 percent of sprawl at the network edge. Built into the G7 blades, the new HP Virtual Connect FlexFabric module connects servers to any Fibre Channel, Ethernet and iSCSI network, eliminating the need for multiple interconnects, and eliminating up to $185,000 in network equipment costs per rack.
Through new integration with HP Server Automation, the HP BladeSystem Matrix software simplifies IT environments with one-touch, self-service provisioning of applications, enabling the deployment of complex IT environments in minutes. The company says users can reduce their total cost of ownership up to 56 percent compared to traditional IT infrastructures. The new version also features automated storage tiering, which assigns storage based on application performance and availability requirements and lowers costs by up to 50 percent.
HP Virtual Connect Flex Fabric modules will be available in third calendar quarter with pricing starting at $18,500. The latest version of HP BladeSystem Matrix will be available in mid-July, starting at $150,000.
Increased energy efficiency and improved administrator productivity delivered by the new Integrated Lights-Out Advanced (iLO 3), Intelligent Power Discovery and HP Insight Control with Dynamic Power Capping technologies. HP says the combination of these provide industry-first levels of management automation as well as energy awareness and control across the data center that lowers energy costs by 96 percent.
Another first is the HP Intelligent Power Discovery software which creates an automated, energy-aware network between ProLiant servers, third-party facility management tools and data center power grids. It creates a real-time, graphical map of energy usage across servers and facilities and can clients up to $5 million per every 1,000 servers in one year.
On the storage side, the company announced what it calls the industry’s first solution to automate data deduplication across the enterprise with a single unified architecture. Available initially in HP’s line of D2D backup systems, the HP StoreOnce software delivers up to 20 percent improvement in performance and more than twice the price/performance ratio of a leading competitive offering.
“Think of this as deduplication 2.0,” said HP's Dave Robertson, senior vice president and general manager. “No one else in the industry has it.”
HP also announced the StorageWorks P4800 BladeSystem storage area network and the Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) Cluster, as well as another first, a client virtualization reference architecture that scales to support thousands of virtual desktops in a simple, modular design that is presized and pretested. The architecture delivers three times the productivity for IT administrators, supports 1,600 users at 50 percent less cost and requires 60 percent less space than traditional client virtualization implementations.
Designed to provide faster deployment with a pretested and performance-tuned configuration designed for multiple client virtualization software implementations, including Microsoft Hyper-V with Citrix XenDesktop and VMWare View, the P4800 delivers 63 TB of storage capacity with four storage blades connected to 140 disk drives. The EVA Cluster enables clients to manage a single resource pool of capacity containing up to 2 petabytes of data and nearly 2,000 drives. HP says customers can consolidate up to 600 percent more storage than a single EVA array, and increase storage utilization up to 300 percent and reduce management costs up to 50 percent. Shipping now, the P4800 starts at $270,000, while the EVA Cluster lists at $63,600.
 |
Hewlett-Packard 
