Managing storage has always been more complicated than most IT organizations would prefer. That situation, unfortunately, has only gotten worse. Even small-to-medium business (SMB) organizations are finding themselves inundated with massive amounts of data that now come in a multitude of formats.
Hewlett-Packard today moved to help SMB organizations iaddress that issue with the launch of HP StoreEasy Storage file server for Windows that doesn’t require an IT storage specialist to manage petabytes of data using multiple HP StoreEasy systems that each support up to 50TB of storage.
According to Brit Terry, product marketing manager for HP Storage, rather than forcing IT organizations to choose between a scale-out versus scale-up approach to storage, HP StoreEasy system is designed to allow IT organizations to dynamically add storage nodes in a way that allows then to logically appear to be one pool of storage.
Based on the storage virtualization technology that HP gained with its acquisition of Lefthand Networks and the latest HP Gen8 server platform, the goal with HP StoreEasy system, says Terry, is to allow Windows systems to easily manage petabytes of unstructured data without having to invest in a proprietary file system. As part of that effort to reduce all the moving parts in a storage environment, HP StoreEasy software also comes with built-in data deduplication and encryption capabilities that also serve to eliminate the need for additional software licenses, says Terry.
HP this week, as part of an expanded SMB push, also introduced an HP M220 Series Access Point that IT organizations can cluster together to create what appears to be one logical access point. It also released a reference architecture for Citrix virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments.
As IT environments get more complex, SMB organizations are going to need to rely more on automation, especially when it comes to managing storage. The first step towards achieving that goal is integrating all the necessary components under a single framework that simplifies data management to the point where the average IT generalist can be successful. Anything short of that more often than not just winds up driving up the total cost of storage beyond the reach of the average SMB organization.
