Hewlett-Packard (HP) plunges into storage area networking (SANs) this week with an acquisition and a splash of products for enterprise networks.
On Monday, HP announced it is buying Transoft Networks, a Santa Barabara concern best known for SAN Manager, software for managing Fibre Channel storage devices on mixed NT and Unix networks. Financial terms of the deal were not announced.
On Wednesday, HP announced it is dumping a reseller agreement with EMC and instead begin reselling Hitachi Data Systems' Freedom storage subsystems. HP is also expected to announce a host bus adapter based on its own Tachyon design.
HP, until recently, resold storage devices from EMC with its servers for large enterprises. In 1998, HP accounted for one-fifth of EMC's storage revenue.
Hitachi's storage products encompass the mid-sized data center to the mainframe glass house. The company presently has agreements with Cisco, Veritas, Oracle, Informix and Gadzoox, among others.
The first product of the HP-HDS partnership is the HP SureStore E Disk Array MC256, a modular disk subsystem that will hold from 60 G-Bytes to 9 terabytes of data. The MC256 also offers software for local or remote data mirroring and data transfer between Windows NT, Unix and mainframe environments.
Meanwhile, HP will also ship a switch it OEMs from McData that operates in both Fibre Channel arbitrated loop and switched fibre networks. The 16-port HP SureStore E Switch F16 connects Windows NT or Unix servers to HP SureStore E storage or EMC Symmetrix storage devices.
The SureStore switch works with Microsoft Cluster Server and can be daisy chained with other switches to span distances of up to 10 kilometers. It also integrates Fibre Channel-to-SCSI technology that allows customers to connect SCSI tape libraries or legacy devices into the SAN.
HP will also introduce HP SureStore E Storage Node Manager, SAN management software that discovers, maps and monitors storage and Fibre Channel devices.
Over time, it will fold Transoft's SAN management product into Storage Node Manager.
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