<font size=-1>HP MAKES WAREHOUSE FULL OF SAN ANNOUNCEMENTS</font>

  • 05/06/1999
HP Expands SAN Strategy With A Chorus Of Announcements

Ken Deats, Associate Editor

In a heavily-attended press conference in New York City on May 5, HP unveiled a gallery of new multiplatform, enterprise-storage initiatives. What follows is a summary of those announcements. (For more on the agreements signed with Hitachi Data Systems, see our breaking news story.)

Multiplatform HP SureStore E Hardware and Software Portfolio
The new HP SureStore E product family includes existing HP storage solutions as well as a host of new products optimized for enterprise storage and storage area networks (SANs) that support multiplatform environments. The HP Equation architecture, with HP SureStore E products, is designed for the industry's most common operating environments and includes the following five product sets:
  • HP SureDesign -- a set of storage solutions that includes disaster recovery, high availability, server consolidation, data sharing and zero-downtime backup.
  • HP SureSpan -- a family of Fibre Channel-fabric networking products, including hubs, switches and SCSI bridges that will offer customers the price/performance advantage of mixed hub and switch environments; support for legacy SCSI investments; and Fibre Channel's, 10-kilometer distance support.
  • HP SureSoft -- a suite of storage-management software for conventional storage and SAN environments that provides centralized data and resource management, including Web-based device monitoring and administration, data mirroring for interapplication data sharing and online backup, data copying at distances up to 43km for disaster recovery and data transfers.
  • HP SureGear -- includes HP's line of disk and tape storage spanning the midrange to the largest enterprise.
  • HP SureGuide -- a newly developed suite of consulting, sales and support offerings to assist customers in the design, implementation, performance tuning and mission-critical operational support of direct-connect and SAN systems.
SureStore E Certification Program
HP’s new SureStore E Reseller/Systems Integrator (SI) Certification Program is designed to provide HP value-added resellers and SIs with the marketing support, product training and technical support required to build long-term, profitable storage businesses. Resellers that join the program will realize business benefits that including:
  • direct links displayed prominently on HP's Internet site;
  • listings in HP marketing material;
  • access to specialized technical assistance to help trouble-shoot customer problems quickly and efficiently;
  • pricing incentives on select enterprise-storage hardware and software; and
  • specialized training to stay on top of the latest storage technologies and trends.
SureStore E Disk Array MC256
The new HP SureStore E Disk Array MC256 is being called a high-end open storage subsystem for the enterprise designed to address growing demand for Fibre Channel SAN-ready disk arrays for open, highly available, centralized storage.
The 11-product software portfolio offered for the MC256 includes:
  • E Business Copy MC -- allows customers to create copies of operational data to facilitate online backup of business-critical data without interrupting application performance;
  • E Continuous Access MC -- enables disaster recovery by mirroring data to remote locations to ensure business continuity in crisis situations;
  • E Data Exchange MC -- facilitates high-speed data transfer and sharing between HP-UX and mainframe environments for such applications as data warehousing or business intelligence;
  • E Secure Manager MC -- secures data between servers when many servers access the same storage subsystem through a SAN;
  • E LUN Configuration Manager MC -- enables fast, simple logical unit (LUN) configuration that makes disk management more effective and orderly;
  • E RAID Manager MC -- server-based software that allows users to manage Business Copy MC and Continuous Access MC applications;
  • E Remote Control MC -- a management tool that allows remote, Web-based configuration and system optimization;
  • E Cache LUN MC -- improves performance significantly by locking a user-definable amount of stored data into safe mirrored cache memory;
  • E Performance Manager MC -- a graphical, Web-based monitoring tool to keep system administrators informed about system performance, provide notification of performance degradation and adjust storage-tuning parameters;
  • E Resource Manager MC -- allows true resource sharing for mixed mainframe and open-systems configurations; and
  • E Continuous Track Manager MC -- monitors systems status, reports errors and failures through sophisticated phone-home capabilities.
The MC256 is supported in MC/ServiceGuard for HP-UX and Microsoft Cluster Server for Windows NT. Specific high-availability solutions from HP include MetroCluster, Mission Critical Server Suites for HP-UX, and zero-downtime backup solutions for online backup of Oracle and SAP through HP OpenView OmniBack II integration. The disk array also will be supported in HP's previously announced ContinentalClusters and 5nines:5minutes program.

Hardware and Software for Multivendor Application Servers and Storage Platforms
Other SureStore E products announced include:

  • HP SureStore E Storage Node Manager -- software to discover, map and monitor storage devices, fabric devices and server host-bus adapters across a SAN.
  • HP SureStore E Switch F16 -- a high-bandwidth, 16-port, multiplatform Fibre Channel switch that interconnects all components of a SAN, including the HP SureStore E portfolio and EMC Symmetrix.
For more news on HP’s enterprise storage products and services, view the Enterprise Storage Business Unit’s home page.

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