By Rohan Viegas, Worldwide Product Management, HP Storage

Gen 5 Fibre Channel is more than just 16Gbps speeds. It unleashes the full potential of high-density server virtualization, cloud architectures and next-generation storage. It offers a purpose-built, data center-proven network infrastructure for storage. And it delivers unmatched performance, reliability and simplicity. Today, Rohan Viegas talks about how the server and storage evolution is driving the need for Gen 5 Fibre Channel and how the HP StoreFabric SN6500B 16Gb Fibre Channel Switch helps meet that need.

Last week, I had a blog post and video I did of the Flash Module for the P9500 - something I learned about while at HP Discover.  Things were just a wee bit busy for me and I didn't have time to learn much about the Flash Module while at Discover, but I called Ayman Abouelwafa.  Ayman is a senior architect in our enterprise storage lab and my go-to engineering guy when I need to understand something about P9500.  Ayman was in one of my first video blogs and was very helpful in doing a video we did talking about our collaboration with Hitachi Japan.

After talking to him, I realized there was a lot I didn't get from my 4 minute conversation at HP Discover - so here's a bit more of what I learned from Ayman.  First he told me about some new firmware.

Performance Accelerator

• Ayman and his team worked with Hitachi Japan on Performance Accelerator, a new firmware-based program that significantly enhances the back-end random performance, targeting SSD and flash media.
• This significantly expands the P9500 frame-limit for random IOPs.  Ayman told me the firmware enables around a million IOPs per P9500.  Wow!

SNW Fall is happening in Santa Clara, yet another event I can't attend as my wife and daughter are enjoying a fabulous trip through Europe. One of the hot topics that will be certainly getting a lot of attention is solid state storage.  My colleague Vish Mulchand, Director of Product Management, joined me late Friday night to record this podcast with me as he presents a session at SNW about solid state technology. 

It's a great discussion with Vish - here's an outline of what we covered:

• Why has solid state changed the IT landscape?
• Where are the different places customers can deploy solid state storage technology?
• We discussed when to use solid state technology?
• Lastly we talked about HP's offerings that include solid state - this is a short discussion. 

Today we made a couple of announcements focused on solid state technology.  There are two pieces of the announcement - one focused on HP 3PAR and the other on HP ProLiant Gen8.  We announced an all-solid state drive (SSD) configuration for 3PAR.  We also announced HP Smart Cache for the HP ProLiant Gen8 servers.  It's server-based caching to accelerate performance.  Check out the blog post to get the details.  There's also a podcast you can listen to.

I'm ready to checkout of the Palazzo and fly home from HP Discover but wanted to get you this blog post before I go.  My colleague Brad Parks and I did a series of three videos while we were in the Bloggers' Lounge at the event and we covered three topics:

• HP StoreOnce and StoreOnce Catalyst
• HP 3PAR and Virtual Connect with Flat SAN technology
• Technology discussion around Solid State Drives (SSD)

We wanted these videos to be short and to the point and I think we hit the mark.  Here's one of the videos on SSD technology - to see the others, go to the blog post.

The good news is that HP is continuing to invest in EVA P6000 Storage. We’re announcing a series of enhancements designed to help you optimize traditional and virtual workloads with new technology innovations. In a nutshell, these enhancements include:

• New models, EVA P6350 and EVA P6550, with twice the cache
• Increased addressable capacity now over 1PB
• New drive options including support for 200GB and 400GB Small Form Factor (SFF) Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) Solid State Disk (SSD)
• New 3TB SAS drive option for increased scalability
• Integration with VMware vSphere Storage APs (VAAI)
• Performance Advisor Software for intuitive, easy-to-use performance monitoring and troubleshooting interface

Several weeks ago I got to "leak" a blog post out talking about our new HP LeftHand P4000-based SSD-based P4900.  I got several questions about the new product via Twitter which led me to gather a few independent storage bloggers and do a podcast talking about the P4900 and taking their questions.  My blogger guests on the podcast are:

• Chris Evans (@chrismevans) who blogs at thestoragearchitect.com
• Hans De Leenheer (@hansdeleenher) who has his blog at hansdeleenheer.blogspot.com
• Luigi Danakos (@nerdblurt) who blogs at www.nerdblurt.com

Today I have an announcement on my blog - a sort of exclusive announcement.  So check out the new SSD-based member of the P4000 family - the P4900.

I sat down with two of our execs to talk about the state of storage technology and what HP is doing to address the storage market. There are three videos here to watch.