Alone, either of those announcements would probably have driven HP yet again to hoist its ILM banner. But the company also unveiled updated backup software and a new optical jukebox, sending the flag up for certain.
We’re covering the bases and hitting our targets for our ILM strategy, said Frank Harbist, HP’s vice president and general manager of ILM. But it would be very hard for any storage product not to hit an ILM base according to HP’s all-embracing definition of the term, as it covers almost every conceivable aspect of storage technology.
The mixed disk support is for HP’s mid-range MSA 1500 array, which can now house SATA and SCSI drives in the same shelf. Unlike the previous generation of parallel ATA disk, serial ATA or SATA disk can be mixed with SCSI disk, precisely because like SCSI it has a serial interface. HP is the first to exploit that ability, Harbist said.
This will make life simpler for the many storage administrators building multi-tiered storage systems that feature ATA and SCSI disk, and it will also spare them the cost of having to use separate shelves for the two drives. The new mixed-disk shelf lists at $8,995.
HP will also be the first to ship an LTO drive that supports WORM encryption of data, needed to meet some data retention regulations. The WORM support is in HP’s implementation of the latest third generation of LTO, which is soon to ship. The other two members Certance LLC and IBM Corp have not been specific about when they will hook WORM into their LTO drives but are expected to do so sometime in the first half of next year.
Until they do HP will enjoy a significant competitive advantage. LTO’s biggest rival by far is Quantum’s DLT tape technology, which was WORM-enabled this summer. Customers will need to buy special WORM tape cartridges from HP to work with the new drives, and the cartridges will list at $199.99, only slightly more than the $182.00 for standard tapes.
Certance shipped its not-yet-WORMed LTO-3 drives in October, and IBM will do so this month, only days after HP. As these two have done, HP has doubled the capacity and more than doubled the speed of LTO-3 compared to its previous LTO generation. The new HP drive offers 400GB of uncompressed capacity, and around 80MB per second throughput. That speed is slightly faster than Certance’s drives, and the same as IBM’s drives.
When IBM announced its LTO-3 drives last month, it highlighted its speed advantage over Certance. Now HP is claiming a speed advantage over IBM. Although the HP and IBM drives both offer the same 80MB per second throughput, HP claimed that when handling compressed data at 160MB per second, the IBM drive is choked by its Ultra160 interface. In contrast the HP drive has an Ultra320 interface.
The software update is to HP’s Data Protector backup tool, which has been bumped up from version 5.1 to version 5.5, with the addition of 200 new functions, HP claimed, including support for direct backup to disk, and simultaneous mirroring of backups.
The new optical juke box is an entry-level table top device, featuring UDO technology licensed from Plasmon.
