I've got news to share with you today and I've put it into a couple of ChalkTalks.  At a high level, the news today is:

• We're introducing the MSA2040, the fourth generation of the MSA that is up to 4X faster than the MSA2000 G3 and competitive entry arrays.  It's the first entry SAN with 16Gb FC and has very cool data in-place upgrade capabilities.
  
• There are enhancements to our HP StoreEasy Storage - this is file and application storage based on Windows Storage Server 2012.  Then enhancements include a new provisioning wizard that makes HP StoreEasy Storage even easier!
  
• HP Simply StoreIT is a channel-exclusive program focused on helping SMBs with solutions for virutalization, file sharing, Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server, and backup and data protection.

Here's the overview ChalkTalk but be sure to check the blog post as there's more details there.

Lastly, I want to invite you to join me and Sr VP and GM of HP Storage David Scott.  Today at 10:30 AM PDT (that's 1:30 PM EDT), I'll host a live webcast with David and we'll talk about this announcement today.  I'm again partnering with my friends at Watchitoo.com; you can download a calendar reminder or if you miss the live broadcast, watch the replay at www.hp.com/go/SimplyStoreIT. 

By Britt Terry, product marketing and resident HP Storage expert for small and midsize business

Last week I talked about the challenges that keep you up at night. Today I wanted to take a few minutes to introduce a “maturity model” concept which we’ll be using to help you address the specific challenges you are facing and the one just over the horizon.  Through a set of solution-based maturity models, we’ll help you address not only today’s challenges but also to foresee the next wave of issues before they even hit.  Sounds a bit like a crystal ball but it’s not.

By Britt Terry, product marketing and resident SMB storage expert, HP Storage

Here I am—as promised in last week’s Around the Storage Block post. Today, I’m kicking off my blog series by delving into the challenges that keep you from getting a good night’s sleep. Now the three categories of challenges I’m going to talk about here are something every business faces, regardless of size. But for small or midsize business like yours, tackling them day in and day out has its own special set of issues. Do they sound familiar? Or are other issues rising to the top of your list? Weigh in here.

By Melissa Saegert Elicker, editor, HP Storage

In the coming weeks, we’ll be welcoming Britt Terry, product marketing manager (and SMB expert) for HP Storage, to Around the Storage Block. Britt will be focusing on the challenges facing SMBs today.  To get the ball rolling – and to get you knowing Britt – this post includes some excerpts from an online interview he gave recently on The Standard Channel. We’ve also got registration details on the live May13 web event where you can learn more about Simply StoreIT and how to tackle the biggest IT issues you are facing today.

One of the announcements made was updates to the X5000.  The X5000 is a great example of making IT simple and is a product I love to talk about.  I have a video from HP Discover in Vienna (from December 2011) that shows a bit more about the X5000.

To learn more about what's new with the X5000 - click on over to the blog post. 

Reposting of article about the announcement made on June 2, focused on storage consolidation for SMBs. We updated the HP StorageWorks Data Vault, X1000, and P2000 product families.

  By Calvin Zito, @HPStorageGuy

On today's podcast, we talk about the HP Total Care announcement with HP StorageWorks Marketing Manager Chris McCall.  The announcement today has three StorageWorks components:

• HP LeftHand P4000 SAN Solutions - new application integrated snapshots that integrates the P4000 replication software with Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).  This integration ensures application quiescing when creating point-in-time copies, simplifying the process
• HP StorageWorks D2D Backup System - new NAS target for backup allows customers to create and backup to a CIFS and/or NFS-based file share and its provided free of charge.  While many customers will find NAS-based backup a desirable feature, small and midsized customers will find this most useful. 
• HP StorageWorks DAT 320 Tape Drives - this is the seventh generation of DAT with 2X the capacity, 75% higher performance and around 50% less power than the previous generation DAT.
   

So with that, here's the podcast:

Here's a link if you trouble with the embedded player and a link to download the MP3 (right click and select "save as")

   By Calvin Zito

I have a ton of things on my list to blog about in the next few days as there's still much to say about the HP Tech Day.  For this post, I'm going to take a slight diversion to share with you a podcast and guest blog from Microsoft's Mark Pendergast.  On Tuesday morning, we announced two new StorageWorks products: the HP StorageWorks X510 Data Vault and the HP StorageWorks X3000 High Availability bundles.  I have a podcast ready to go for the X3000 as well but this post will focus on the X510.  First, here's the podcast I did with Bill Johnson, the product manager for it.  (NOTE: X500 is the new family - and yes, we're planning more in the future - while the X510 is the product we announced).

(NOTE: Adding a link for those browsers that can't play the embedded podcast: click here to listen)

Here are a few links to help you go deeper:

• Article about the X500 Data Vault titled, "Think data storage has to be complicated? Think again"
• Here's a link to the U.S. product page

And here's a short video demo of it:

(NOTE: If this video doesn't work, go to the article "Think data storage has to be complicated? Think again" and there's a link to it on the right side)

And now here's the post from Mark who is part of the Windows Home Server team at Microsoft:

By Mark Pendergrast

We're thrilled to have been invited to share the Microsoft perspective on the Hewlett-Packard DataVault launch with readers of the HP Around the Storage Block Blog.  But we're even more excited to celebrate this important new milestone for the Windows Home Server ecosystem - a dedicated product entry into the Small Office Home Office (SoHo) and micro business space! 

As we've posted about before on the Windows Home Server team blog, there is significant value for having a Windows Home Server in a SoHo or micro business.  From backing up client PCs to offering remote access to their server (and the files on the Data Vault ) when they're away from the office, a Windows Home Server-based product offers a great solution for a business that doesn't have - or want - a sophisticated IT infrastructure.  We thought this was such a good match that we recently added a dedicated 'Windows Home Server SoHo' page on our product website (lots of good info up there, including some compelling case studies).  But Microsoft and HP aren't the only ones who recognize this value, as business pubs SMB PC Magazine and Inc have caught on to this fact as well.   

So we congratulate HP on making the first entry into this market with their dedicated line of Data Vault line of products.  Because HP has built in the right set of features, hardware specifications, branding, and of course channel/marketing support, we're confident that they're on to something big here!  We look forward to partnering with them on the launch and beyond. 

Mark, Windows Home Server Team, Microsoft

So there you have it - a jammed pack post with a podcast, a video and a Microsoft guest blog.  Phew! 

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Editor's note: fixed formatting on 10/8/2010

By Mike Moroze, HP LeftHand Usability Corner

I sat down with Chris McCall the manager of product marketing in our Unified Storage Division (a part of HP's StorageWorks Division) to discuss how small and medium sized companies are looking at virtualization. What we're seeing is that more and more small and medium sized companies are finding that their virtualization requirements are similar to large enterprises. I asked Chris some question to help me understand the SMB and virtualization market better.

Usability Corner (UC): Virtualization seems to be taking off in the enterprise business space, do you see a similar trajectory for the Small-Medium Business (SMB)?  If so, why?

Chris McCall (CM):  No, I see a different trajectory for SMB.  Virtualization in the SMB space is not growing as fast as in the enterprise space because virtualization puts up a few roadblocks that make it difficult for SMB's to implement. They can limit the full potential of virtualization.  The biggest roadblock to virtualization is storage; for many SMB's, it's too expensive and requires too many resources to manage and implement. However, VMWare HA (high availability), and VMotion - require shared storage.

UC: Why would an SMB customer choose an HP LeftHand virtualization solution over another vendor's solution?

CM:  For SMB customers that expect their virtual environment to grow, HP LeftHand solutions provides a very cost-effective entry point which is massively scalable. Purchase what you want to today and grow it to whatever size you want -- maintaining HA. And for customers that don't want to deal with external storage we have the VSA (Virtual Storage Appliance) which transforms server disk drives into iSCSI SANs with the same level of scalability. 

UC: Usability can bring several competitive advantages to a product. Can you comment on what advantages you see our customers relying on in terms of the usability of the HP LeftHand solution? 

CM:  Virtual Server environments provide a very dynamic application environment. Customers can roll out new applications, change configurations, and move workloads around very easily. So what does that mean from a storage manageability perspective? It puts pressure on being able to change storage configurations more often. Any product that allows simple on-line storage configurations so your storage needs can change quickly and frequently is not only a competitive advantage but a requirement.  Our HP LeftHand P4000 Centralized Management Console allows us to do that easily - the GUI (Graphical User Interface) makes it simple without any downtime with your volumes.  

UC: What key usability advantages do you believe that the HP LeftHand solutions have over the competition?

CM:   Non-disruptive configuration changes, non-disruptive performance scaling, simple GUI requires less time to manage; Our solution provides for easy thin provisioning - there are no setting of thresholds, growth increments, etc. --- same with snapshots, you don't have to set reserves and there's no guesswork - the system takes care of all that for you.

UC: In the context of SMBs and virtualization - virtualization typically provides a fairly high ROI.  Would you agree that ROI is an important decision criterion for virtualization?  What other criteria are important for SMB storage decisions?

CM - ROI used to be the number one criteria; improving business continuity has become number one over the last year. For SMBs, business continuance has become more important because with virtualization, you're putting more eggs in fewer baskets.

UC: ROI of usability is also frequently referenced as a reason to ensure usability is considered in product development. Would you agree?  What other reasons would there be to include usability in HP LeftHand solutions?

CM:  Yes absolutely - usability is all about ROI. Customer satisfaction and troubleshooting are also critical -- the easier it is to understand what's going on, the more likely you are to avoid potential downtime.

UC: How would you rate the usability of our solution for the SMB customer compared to our competitors?

CM:  Considering the comprehensive feature set provided in addition to simplicity, I honestly believe HP P4000 is the best- take a look at the Windows IT Pro article from by Michael Otey which just posted.

UC: What are the 3 or so main pain points that virtualization is solving for the SMB customer?  How does our solution help alleviate these pain points? 

CM: 

• First - Cost - you can run more apps on less servers.  However, this means you're putting more of your eggs in fewer baskets, which leads to the next issue;


• Second - Maintaining high availability


• Third -   Improve IT environment flexibility 

HP LeftHand addresses the cost issue by providing a solution that allows you to buy only what you need to today and grow it non-disruptively. Also, thin provisioning cuts initial outlay, and for customers that want to leverage server disk drives, VSA eliminates the need for external storage hardware. High availability is achieved by HP LeftHand's highly redundant and highly available solutions that leverage Network RAID in addition to the traditional HW RAID. These solutions protect against more than just disk drives and controller failures. Our system can stay online during full node failures, air conditioning failures, power outages, etc. - applications never lose access to their data.

Our solutions improve your IT environment's flexibility.  All configuration changes, and increasing performance and capacity can be done non-disruptively which delivers a flexible storage environment which you need for flexible IT environment.

UC: Any thoughts on how HP LeftHand can improve its customer focus in designing and developing solutions that meet our customer needs?

CM:  Ultimately, we don't want users using our UI, we want it so simple that it rolls into the IT environment and you don't have to manage storage as a separate entity, everything just works... Storage tasks are automated with higher level IT tasks -- like rolling out applications or increasing application performance. 

UC:  Thanks Chris!

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