HP floods storage market with new products

HP has announced another huge range of storage products focussing on data protection and archiving. They are:

• ProLiant Data Protection Storage Servers which use Microsoft's DPM to provide near-continuous disk-to-disk backup. HP is the first of Microsoft's OEMS to do this.
• The 6840 Virtual Library System that can store up to 40TB of data and back up data at a rate of over 575Mbit/s. This exceeds the speed and capacity of the existing VLS6105 and VLS6510 products.
• An Electronic Vaulting Service that will have customers' data sent over WAN links to be stored in an HP data centre. No agent software is needed on client servers. This competes with similar services from Iron Mountain and InTechnology.
• A File Migration Agent which moves files between tiers of disk storage and runs on any Windows 2003 platform.
• A Reference Information Manager (IM) for databases that moves old data out of databases to an archive. This reduces the size of databases quickening searches and speeding performance of applications dependent on database speed.
• An Enterprise Backup Solution - a bundle of hardware, software and services.
• Exchange 2003 Replication which replicates Exchange data from one EVA array to a remote one.
• Rapid Backup and Rapid Restore for mySAP which backs up mySAP data.
• The Replications Solutions Manager that provides centralised management of replication activities
• An HP Medical Archiving Solution which is a grid storage application for storing reference medical data
• And finally, OpenView Storage Data Protector - a scalable storage management product that can look after both local and remote devices. HP claims it's less than half the cost of competing products.

About the only storage gap not filled by HP is a continuous data protection (CDP) product. And they're already working on it. Bob Schultz, of its StorageWorks division, said: "You will see us deliver CDP in the near future."

So is HP really number one in storage? IDC says it's numero uno in worldwide total disk storage systems revenue, has the largest share of non-mainframe SAN units, is first in tape back-up market share and number one in overall storage market share. About the only thing it isn't number one is NAS shipments or revenue.