HP Give It Large

Yesterday afternoon I had an opportunity to meet with HP as part of an informal session to make contact with storage bloggers. HP are obviously interested in the possible benefits keeping the blogging community well informed could bring, however my blog is not to act as a mouthpiece for the HP marketing department and I'd suggest if you want to keep abreast of their technology releases, use this XML link.

What's more interesting is where HP storage is headed. Take for example their new Extreme Storage solution. A scalable NAS product which reaches the heady heights of 820TB in a single unit. Fantastic you may think, and I guess if you have a real need for this volume of data in a single unit, then it's the one for you.

However, apart from the obvious issues like whether your raised floor can actually take the weight of a fully configured device (and how do you cool this kind of beast), what troubles me more is how much data on a system like this is actually of any use.

Although the ExDS9100 is aimed at delivering storage for high performance solutions, I think there is a risk of arrays like this being deployed to defer the hard work of actually classifying and setting sensible deletion policies, which, let's face it, for most companies has sat as a task in the "too hard box" for as long as NAS storage has been around. It may well be that some customers see this product as a way to defer the inevitable and actually start managing their data.

Anyway, fair play to HP for entering the market and making use of their Polyserve acquisition and fair play to them for wanting to talk to the blogging community too. If I get any juicy nuggets of information (like whether HP have a position on cloud storage), you can be sure I'll share it here.