In line with HP’s publicly declared plan to deliver ILM products via partnerships, three of the four products are OEM’ed technologies namely Microsoft’s DPM, OuterBay Inc’s database archiving tool, and Sepaton Inc’s virtual tape library.The vaulting service is based on software from Asigra Inc. The one product that was developed by HP is a client-based file migration tool.
On September 26, HP will ship two new Proliant Windows-powered NAS filers, ready loaded with Microsoft’s DPM software. DPM entered beta in April, and is Microsoft’s first backup product. It is similar to continuous data protection CDP tools such as Veritas’ Panther software, which is also due to ship soon.
But by Microsoft’s own admission, DPM does not truly qualify as a CDP product because it only snapshots data once an hour. With amazing precision, HP said that DPM will cut the risk of data loss by exactly 96% compared to a daily backup, because 23 divided by 24 is 0.96. Like Panther and other products, DPM also provides rapid self-service recovery of files for end-users.
HP already offers a low-end vaulting service that it OEMs from LiveVault. In the fourth quarter it will launch another service that can handle larger volumes of data and is aimed at large businesses. The new service will be run from HP’s 70 data centers worldwide, and will be based on Asigra’s appliance-based compression and single-instancing software. According to HP, this reduces data volumes by a factor of 90 on average, and a factor of 700 in some circumstances, so cutting what would otherwise be prohibitive bandwidth costs.
HP has become the latest vendor to OEM OuterBay’s database archiving or pruning software. EMC Corp began OEMing the same product in 2003, and Sybase Inc and NEC also OEM the software. The product automatically moves less frequently accessed data from primary databases into secondary or archive storage, in order to boost database performance.
Under HP’s marketing the software will be called the Reference Information Manager for Database Archiving, and one of its applications will be to archive Exchange data to HP’s RISS appliance. Privately-held OuterBay launched its software in 2000, but says that product took on real substance in 2002. Independent of its OEMs, OuterBay said it has scored around 200 implementations to date.
Also at the end of the month, HP will begin shipping a 40TB virtual tape library OEM’ed from Sepaton. The new box is also faster than its 10TB predecessor, and can handle 575MB per second.
The file migration software that HP will ship in the fourth quarter automatically moves data to a choice of secondary storage platforms such as the HP RISS, or NAS devices. Called the HP File Migration Agent, the policy-based software will ship in the fourth quarter.
