HP Bolsters ILM Capabilities

HP has announced a rash of improvements to its ILM products that positions it to compete head to head with EMCs Centera while making stronger inroads into the mid-tier market.

The Hewlett-Packard Co. StorageWorks RISS (Reference Information Storage System) now sports a "smart cell" of 850G, more than double the size of the original smart cell.

Built on top of the StorageWorks grid, the smart cell contains data, information and indexes, allowing for quick information retrieval.

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The new RISS also has a base configuration of 1.7T instead of the original 1T, and the price has been dropped.

HPs "smart cell" technology can be a boon to companies that need to add capacity, said Dianne McAdam, senior analyst at Data Mobility Group of Nashua, N.H.

"With the cell technology, every time you add capacity you add processing power and an indexing structure to it. So it allows you to scale without having the problems other systems might have, where performance suffers when you add a lot more storage because you havent increased processing power," she said.

The company also announced changes in its e-mail archiving solution, called RIM (Reference Information Manager) for Messaging.

Previously, the focus was specifically on the Exchange environment, but the new version also covers Lotus Domino.

"It allows users to transparently move from one environment to another," said Paul OBrien, director of ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) for HPs StorageWorks division.

"If you collect information in Notes, we can return it through Exchange, and vice versa."

RIM for Messaging also allows seamless upgrades from previous versions of Exchange to newer versions by not requiring that archived information be converted.

Next Page: HPs StorageWorks File System Extender.