Hewlett-Packard Co. will announce two new storage management products and details of its future interoperability plans this week.
One product, OpenView Continuous Access Storage Appliance, is a renamed upgrade to the companys StorageApps sv3000 virtualization product; the other new product, OpenView Storage Media Operations, automates removable media management, officials said.
OpenView CASA now has asynchronous write ordering, which speeds up replication because users dont have to wait for a confirmation each time data is transferred, said an HP spokesman. It also now supports data sharing across appliances, plus NetWare versions 5.1 and 6, and clustering for HP-UX.
“Now [users] can go extended distances … from local to remote with no performance delay,” said Dianne McAdam, an analyst with Data Mobility Group LLC, in Nashua, N.H. The asynchronous writing works by time-stamping transferred data, so it can be assembled in the right order, even if it arrives at the wrong time, she noted.
CASA is available now, starting at $122,500 for up to 20 hosts and four midrange storage systems. Also, “beta is imminent” for Palo Alto, Calif.-based HPs other virtualization product, VersaStor, the HP spokesman said. Availability of VersaStor was planned for this year but will be delayed until 2003, he said.
OpenView Storage Media Operations, also available now, is policy-based software for managing tapes. Users can make daily task lists and control tape libraries, bar-code scanners and media label printers, officials said. It works alone or with the OpenView Storage Data Protector, and starts at $8,400 per server, with unlimited clients and up to 2,000 media units. Early next year, he said, Storage Media Operations will use XML to integrate with backup software from Veritas Software Corp. and Legato Systems Inc., both of Mountain View, Calif.
Officials did not name CASA beta customers, but Storage Media Operations is already used internally at HP for managing 900,000 tapes, they said.
Meanwhile, to help users whose data centers involve storage products from many vendors, HP will support the Common Information Model in its full range of disk arrays in mid-2003, officials said. CIM, which is a universal language for storage products to speak, and an early version of which is already supported in HPs XP1024 and StorageWorks VA 7400 arrays, will also be supported in OpenView Storage Area Manager and OpenView Data Protector, an HP official said.
