HP goes green with new storage systems

HP jumped on the green bandwagon Tuesday with the announcement of three new midrange storage systems and tape drives that it claims can reduce data-center cooling costs by as much as 50%.

At the HP Americas StorageWorks Conference in Las Vegas, HP launched the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) 4100, 6100 and 8100, new tape drives based on the LTO-4 standard and a tape product designed for HP BladeSystem c-Class enclosures.

The new EVAs are as much as 45% more power efficient and 24% faster than previous EVA models, according to HP. They use technologies such EVA Dynamic Capacity Management, Vsnap and low-cost Fibre ATA drives to improve drive utilization, eliminate unnecessary drive purchases and reduce energy consumption.

The Dynamic Capacity Management (DCM) technology, which HP says is similar to thin provisioning, lets customers increase utilization rates by dynamically provisioning storage resources according to application needs. A new virtual-disk-service, volume-shrink feature in Microsoft Windows Server 2008 allows DCM to continuously monitor storage-utilization rates and automatically grow or shrink host volumes.

The HP StorageWorks LTO-4 Ultrium1840 tape drive for midsized and enterprise customers consumes 50% or fewer watts per gigabyte than previous generations of HP tape drives. The LTO-4 Ultrium 1840 tape drives also will be integrated into HP tape libraries.

The HP Ultrium 448c Tape Blade is a half-height tape storage blade for HP BladeSystem c-Class servers and storage blades. Designed for customers not using a storage-area network, the Ultrium 448c provides direct-attach data protection. Using HP’s Dynamic Power Saving mode, it can reduce power consumption by as much as 22%.

Further, the HP StorageWorks DAT 160 tape drive consumes fewer watts per gigabyte than previous generations of DAT drives. Available with a SCSI or USB interface, the DAT 160 is designed for use with HP ProLiant 100 and 300 servers.