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.

Kate Davis (@KateAtHP) has done a great job of getting the conversation going around Software Defined Storage and I thought it would be helpful to do a ChalkTalk giving an overview on our perspective.  Here's a single link to all of the blog posts on ATSB focused on SDS.

One of the things I'm most excited about here at HP Storage is there's a strong focus on having a strategy and vision that we're driving toward - and as I've said here, I think it's right on the mark!.  That vision is Converged Storage.  In the ChalkTalk, you'll see how software-defined storage and Converged Storage.... dare I say it, converge.

Vish Mulchand is our Director of Product Management - his team is defining the future of HP Converged Storage through products like HP 3PAR StoreServ and HP StoreVirtual.  With more and more conversations happening around flash and flash-based storage, I thought it would be good to kick off some conversations focusing on the topic.  I thought Vish would be ideal to kick-off the conversation because he had a session at SNW (a storage focused industry event) in October 2012 focused on flash and I did a podcast with him back then talking about it.  NOTE: that was ATSB podcast #122 if you subscribe via iTunes. In some ways, the two conversations go together so if you haven't listened to that podcast with Vish, you should check it out.

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.

Seems like we've had a steady stream of announcements over the last several months and a few of them have come from our HP StoreVirtual team.  We made some enhancements to the HP StoreVirtual Storage in November, including changing the name from HP LeftHand.  I did a ChalkTalk on those updates.

About a month ago, we had a few more updates to share focused on new mid-range StoreVirtual appliances and I had another ChalkTalk with those updates.

By Kate Davis, @KateAtHP, WW Product Marketing Manager, HP StoreVirtual Storage

In my last post, I posed a question: How do you define software-defined storage? I offered up a base definition of what software-defined storage means to HP. Since then IDC has released a new taxonomy on software-defined storage which includes its definition. You’ll see that our definitions are very similar: industry-standard hardware layered with feature-rich storage software. This naturally turns the conversation to VSA—and 4 reasons VSA is the future.

If you read my blog recently, you know I was at Microsoft Management Summit last week.  I brought Andy McCaskey (SDRNews.com) and Jeffery Powers (Geekazine.com) to help with a live stream webcast we did.  We did a couple of interviews every hour and ended up with a lot of great information.  Andy and Jeff have been hard at work on the videos and are posting them as fast as they can and I wanted to share a few of them with them with you.

There are some interesting videos focused on the Serverquarium - the infrastructure that ran all of the Hands-on-Labs at MMS and a discussion about a new Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V Reference Architecture built around HP 3PAR StoreServ 7000.

A couple weeks ago I had a couple of blog posts from our HP Converged Cloud Tech Day in Puerto Rico. One of the topics that we focused on was HP Storage and OpenStack.  Today we're making official that our HP Converged Storage portfolio, including HP 3PAR StoreServ and HP StoreVirtual, now support OpenStack technology across both iSCSI and Fibre Channel protocols. 

Today we're announcing that HP submitted the blueprint for Fibre Channel connectivity with OpenStack's Grizzly platform which was accepted as a part of the OpenStack Cinder project.  HP delivered the Fibre Channel connectivity software to OpenStack and today marks its official release. 

There's more details in my blog post so check it out!

A couple of weeks ago I did the first of several ChalkTalks giving an overview of HP 3PAR StoreServ architecture.  I have several more in mind but its been busy and I haven't been able to get back to creating them.

Enrico Signoretti is a blogger and independent consultant from Italy.  I've brought him to HP Discover in Las Vegas over the last couple of years because of his blogs focus on storage.

You're probably wondering what does Enrico and my HP 3PAR StoreServ ChalkTalks have to do with each other.  Well, Enrico wrote a white paper about 3PAR StoreServ and its called "Down to Earth Report on HP 3PAR StoreServ".