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SINGAPORE—Data
growth is certainly exploding in various industries.
Hewlett-Packard (HP) is solving this problem by
delivering enormous storage capacity and simplified
management through a high-scalable, low-cost
architecture.
HP
launched Wednesday its new product—StorageWorks 9100
Extreme Data Storage—that can manage petabytes of file
through a common management interface, making it ideal
for online and digital-media businesses.
Petabyte
is a unit of information or computer storage equal to
one quadrillion bytes.
“As
business requirements rapidly change with digital-media
files growing at an alarming rate, many enterprises need
a solution that manages growth of information,” said Jim
Wagstaff, vice president and general manager of HP’s
StorageWorks Division, at a press briefing.
Information, he added, is doubling every 18 months, and
it means management of information can be out of
control.
Wagstaff
said HP’s new storage product enables consumers to
significantly “reduce costs and simplify management of
massive amounts of data” commonly associated with online
or digital-media business models.
“This
new product reduces the number of administrators and the
cost necessary to manage this highly-demanding
environment,” he said.
Wagstaff
said companies have been building new business services,
including photo sharing, media streaming and social
networking, which generate vast amounts of file-base
data needing to be stored, managed and retrieved.
Current
storage system for these environments cost two to five
times more than the new HP storage solutions, said
Wagstaff.
At
present, no other file-based, network-attached storage
solution in the market can scale at the multi-petable
level and offer powerful, integrated software management
tools designed for huge amounts of data.
The
product is the first in a series for scale-out
environment, such as “cloud computing,” which is an
emerging category where services are delivered via the
Internet, HP said in a statement.
“Many
companies are struggling with file-based growth—not only
how to cope with the sheer growth but also how to
leverage their digital and static media to create
additional revenue by delivering online services,” said
Mark Peters, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.
“Customers are looking for systems that combine
scalability with simplified management, ease of use, and
all-in-one application support. Put very simply, new
business model requires usability as much as
storability,” Wagstaff said.
Unlike
other system architectures, he said the firm designed
the new product to provide both performance and capacity
independently, leading to greater flexibility in
matching capabilities to unique workloads.
“This
ensures that critical business applications are always
available despite rapidly changing environments,” he
said. |
