HP promises greener storage

HP has introduced environmentally friendly storage technology which it claims can cut storage array power and cooling costs in data centres by 50 percent. 

The new Adaptive Infrastructure products were unveiled at the HP Americas StorageWorks Conference in Las Vegas. 

HP is claiming to offer a range of enhancements for the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array family, along with tape drives based on the Linear Tape Open 4 standard and new DAT 160 tape drives for small and medium businesses.

The company also released the first HP StorageWorks tape product developed exclusively for HP BladeSystem c-Class enclosures.

Analyst firm StorageIO Group said recently that storage currently accounts for up to 40 percent of overall data centre energy usage from hardware. 

With the new HP storage products, a customer with a monthly storage electricity bill of US$3,000 could save as much as US$18,000 a year in power and cooling costs, according to HP.

"Power and cooling is a key enabler for an adaptive infrastructure, and these environmentally responsible products will help address two key areas: saving money and conserving energy," said Dave Roberson, senior vice president and general manager of the StorageWorks division at HP.

The HP StorageWorks EVA 4100, 6100 and 8100 midrange disk arrays improve power efficiency for customers by up to 45 percent compared to previous EVAs, offering claimed performance improvements of up to 24 percent.

Tony Asaro, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, said: "We did a study in 2006 that found that 55 percent of end users we surveyed left between 30 and 50 percent of their storage capacity stranded."

Similar to thin provisioning, HP's new Dynamic Capacity Management software enables customers to double capacity utilisation rates and delay the purchase of additional hard drives.

Using the new virtual disk service volume shrink feature in Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Dynamic Capacity Management continuously monitors storage utilisation rates and automatically increases or decreases host volumes to match application data needs.

This reduces the necessity for ongoing storage administration and practically eliminates stranded storage.

Tape drives continue to be the most energy efficient storage technology for long-term data retention as they require neither power nor cooling while maintaining data integrity for up to 30 years.

Hence the second product highlight is the HP StorageWorks LTO-4 Ultrium 1840 tape drive which provides mid-sized and enterprise customers with HP's highest capacity tape backup to date, consuming up to 50 per cent fewer watts per gigabyte than previous generations.

The new drive also uses LTO-4 technology and Advanced Encryption Standard 256-bit data encryption to protect data if the cartridges are lost or stolen.

The HP Ultrium 448c Tape Blade is a new half-height tape storage blade that provides data protection for HP BladeSystem c-Class servers and storage blades.

The Tape blade is aimed at customers not connected to a storage area network, and provides direct-attached data protection for half-height and full-height c-Class server blades.

It also utilises the HP Dynamic Power Saving mode to achieve up to a 22 percent reduction in power requirements, and supports HP One-Button Disaster Recovery which allows quick recovery from the latest backup set in the event of a hard drive failure.

Finally, the HP StorageWorks DAT 160 tape drive aims to provide a balance of price and performance for small and medium business customers and consumes fewer watts per gigabyte than previous generations of DAT drives.

The DAT 160 is designed for use with HP ProLiant 100 and 300 series servers and available with either a SCSI or USB interface.

It offers backup speeds of up to 50GB per hour and offers up to 160GB of capacity on a single cartridge, twice the capacity and performance of any other DAT drive available.

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