If you are going to do something, make it matter.  That was the key phrase that was posted throughout the conference at HP Discover 2012 in Las Vegas a couple weeks ago.  With some of the new announcements, HP did just that.

One of the biggest announcements in my opinion is the HP Virtual Connect Direct-Attached Fibre Channel Storage for 3PAR. In a nutshell, it helps to reduce your SAN infrastructure by eliminating switches and HBAs. You connect your Blade System Servers directly to the 3PAR array.  This allows you to have a single layer FC storage network.  Since you won’t have a fabric to manage, you can increase your provisioning process by as much as 2.5X.  Also, by removing the fabric layer, you can eliminate up to 55% latency.

This will allow organizations to reduce costs by eliminating the SAN fabric.  It will save on operating costs by cutting down on capital expenditure.  It also scales with the “pay as you grow” methodology allowing you to purchase only what you need.

Complexity is greatly decreased with the wire-once strategy.  If new servers are added to the Blade Chassis, they simply access the storage through the already connected cabling.

Virtual Connect Manager allows for a single pane of glass approach.  It can be used through a web interface or CLI, for those UNIX lovers.

The new trend in IT is Big Data.  Some of the biggest customer challenges are the velocity and volume of data, the large variety and disparate sources of data, and the complex analytics that are required for maximizing the value of information.  HP introduced Vertica 6, which does all of
these.

Vertica 6 FlexStore has been expanded to allow access to any data, stored at any location, through any interface.  You can connect to Hadoop File Systems, existing databases, and data warehouses.  You can also access unstructured analysis platforms such as HP/Autonomy IDOL.

It also includes high performance data analytics for the R Statistical Tool natively and in parallel without the in-memory and single-threaded limitations of R. Vertica 6 has expanded their C++ SDK to add secure sandboxing of user-defined code.

Workload Management simplifies the user experience by enabling more diverse workloads.  Some users experienced up to a 40X speed increase on their queries.  Regardless of size, Workload Management balances all system resources to meet SLAs.

Vertica 6 software will run on the HP public cloud.  Web and mobile applications generate a ton of data.  This will allow business intelligence to quickly spot any trends that are developing and act accordingly.

Not to be overlooked are the enhancements made to the core components that are already part of the system.

Over the past few years, there has been a big interest in disk to disk backup and deduplication.  HP’s latest solution in this space is the B6200 with StoreOnce Catalyst software.  It has over 50 patents that deliver world record performance of 100TB/hr backups and 40TB/hr restores.  This claims to be 3X and 5X faster, respectively, than the next leading competitor.

The hardware is scalable.  It starts at 48TB (32TB usable) and can grow to 768TB (512TB usable).  With a typical deduplication rate of 20X, the system can provide extended data protection for up to 10PBs.

This is a federated backup solution that allows you to move data from remote sites to multiple datacenters without having to reduplicate it.  It integrates with HP Data Protector, Symantec NetBackup, and Symantec BackupExec giving the administrator one console to manage all deduplication, backup, and disaster recovery operations.

The portfolio also includes smaller units for SMB customers. They take advantage of the same type of technologies allowing companies to meet those pesky backup windows.

As a leading HP Partner, GreenPages can assist you with these or any of the products in the HP portfolio.

By Mark Mychalczuk