HP unveils archiving, data protection

HP in the US has unveiled some new storage products aimed at enterprise data protection and archiving.

Duncan Campbell, vice-president of marketing for HP StorageWorks in the US, said the new products mainly targeted the enterprise but some would also suit SMBs.

The HP ProLiant Data Protection Server bundles Microsoft's Windows Data Protection Manager (DPM) software with a ProLiant server as one product, Campbell said.

Windows DPM was released earlier this year. It took data snapshots every hour to update copies of data in case information was lost or corrupted, HP said.

The software competes with other vendors' continuous data protection software that can take snapshots several times a second.

Also new from HP was Virtual Tape Library System 6840. The 6840 followed model 6105 that came out in May. The 6840 has capacity of up to 10TB and a throughput of up to 575MB per second, compared to the 6105's 40TB and 400MB per second, Campbell said.

Thomas Goepel, business strategy and portfolio manager for HP's business services, said the vendor also introduced a managed archiving service called HP Electronic Vaulting (E-Vaulting) Services, that aimed to provide scaleable, automated remote backup.

E-Vaulting let customers compress and move encrypted data to one of 70 HP recovery centres worldwide, Goepel said.

But users must also have a recovery appliance based on an HP server using software from Canada-based Asigra in the data centre. However, no agents or client software were installed on the production servers, Goepel said.

HP also unveiled the StorageWorks File Migration agent, which uses policies similar to those for migrating inactive data to lower-cost storage devices, including NAS appliances.

A StorageWorks Reference Information Manager for Database Archiving was also released, based on archiving software from US-based OuterBay.

Michael Howard, chief executive of OuterBay, said the software identified inactive information in databases and relocated it to cheaper storage facilities. Users could observe the process, he said.

The software was also resold by EMC under the Database Xtender brand, sources said.

Campbell said the Reference Information Manager software would first be available for Oracle and SAP databases. Microsoft and PeopleSoft application availability would come later, he said.