Tape isn't dead: HP

HP announces local availability for new tape and flash storage products.

Mike Pietro, HP general manager of storage for Asia-Pacific and Japan

Mike Pietro, HP general manager of storage for Asia-Pacific and Japan

HP won’t let go of old storage technologies as it tries to transition customers to new ones, according to company officials at the HP World Tour in Beijing.

The company announced an all-flash storage product, 3PAR StoreServe 7450 at the same media event as a new tape-based product, the StoreEver MSL6480 Tape Library.

“Tape is here to stay,” declared Mike Prieto, HP general manager of storage for Asia-Pacific and Japan.

“It’s a powerful blend of cost-effective, scalable, dependable and removable storage.” In addition, tape provides compliance with many regulations around the world, he said.

For disaster recovery, “it provides offline data protection and it is a last line of defence in any organisation,” he said. For backup and recovery, tape can help “optimize price performance by moving backup that is not required fast access for onto the lowest cost storage tier.”

“We know that disk-to-disk is absolutely accelerating and tape is not growing at the same level, but there will always be a need for tape,” Prieto said.

“There is no single disk or tape solution that can provide best-practice data protection in a mid-sized company,” he said. “Disk and tape are complementary.”

HP’s new tape library, which can do 60.4 TB/hour and store 3.5PB, has an entry price of A$35,999 and available now.

Prieto said HP’s all-flash 3PAR product is a mid-priced product that strikes a compromise between offerings from legacy vendors and startups.

HP said the product can do 550,000 input/output operations per second with a 0.7 millisecond response time. It costs A$195,000 and is available now.

“Customers are stuck with two bad choices,” he said. The first one is an inefficient legacy array packed with solid-state drives that is never going to reach the full potential of flat flash array. The second bad choice is going with a startup, all-flash array organization that is going to, guess what, create another silo.”

However, while HP is pursuing flash, the company is “not giving up on the traditional storage we have,” Prieto said. “Many customers need that for their legacy IT architectures”

“This is not going to be a light switch that happens tomorrow,” but accelerating trends of cloud and virtualization require movement to flash, he said. “We want to be able to capture and help our customers, take them to this new world.”

HP also announced a storage-defined storage product called HP StoreOnce VSA which provides backup as a service offering for hosting providers. HP said the product reduces physical hardware requirements by up to 50 per cent and energy costs by up to 70 per cent.

The StoreOnce VSA will be available in Australia in late July for A$4699.

Adam Bender travelled to Beijing as a guest of HP.

Follow Adam Bender on Twitter: @WatchAdam

Follow Computerworld Australia on Twitter: @ComputerworldAU, or take part in the Computerworld conversation on LinkedIn: Computerworld Australia

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