HP Increases Storage Services
Leveraging its service support group, Hewlett-Packard (HP) has announced new storage services. The company intends its new services to make managing storage easier and cheaper for users. The new services include a replication solution, disaster-tolerant management, optimization assessment, data sanitization, a storage area management solution, and pay-per-use solutions for storage.
The first new service is the HP Data Replication Solution. The service implements customized and integrated data replication, which takes snapshots of local storage and enables mirroring the storage snapshot to a remote site. The service works on both HP and non-HP arrays locally and remotely.
HP Disaster Tolerant Management, the second new service, prepares companies for disaster scenarios by reviewing and testing servers, networks, and recovery plans. As part of the service, HP will work with customers to make sure the customers are prepared and able to handle disasters. Rather than building their own remote data centers for disasters, customers can take advantage of 50 HP recovery centers around the world.
HP claims the third new service, HP Storage Optimization Assessment, is vendor-agnostic. The service reviews the storage resources a customer is using and helps the customer make better use of its storage investments. The service is aimed toward optimizing existing resources and not necessarily selling new hardware.
HP hopes its fourth new service, HP Data Sanitization, will prevent sensitive data from being leaked on disposed hard disks and storage systems. The service, which works only on HP hard disks now but will extend to other vendors' hard disks in the future, eliminates data on decommissioned storage devices to ensure that sensitive data isn't recoverable.
The fifth new service, HP Storage Area Management Solution, uses HP's OpenView Storage Area Management suite to manage data on EMC, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), HP, and IBM storage arrays.
The pay-per-use storage introduced by HP is available for HP StorageWorks XP 128 and 1024 disk arrays and lets customers pay a fixed monthly fee plus a variable fee based on actual usage of their disk array. The new HP services are now available from HP Storage Resellers.
