HP has announced a software and hardware storage virtualization solution that enables enterprises to improve productivity, simplify operations and achieve lower total cost of ownership for their storage-area network environments.

Part of HP's growing portfolio of storage virtualization solutions, the new HP StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform improves the efficiency and simplifies the management of heterogeneous midrange storage arrays.

HP SVSP is a network-based storage platform that pools capacity across HP and non-HP storage hardware. It works together with the HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Array and the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array as well as a number of third-party arrays to centralize the management of a virtualized SAN environment.

As a result, enterprise customers deploying Fibre Channel SANs are able to significantly simplify operations and improve overall productivity.

Data services reduce total cost

HP SVSP features data services that enable customers to quickly adapt to changing business needs while reducing total cost of ownership and enhancing disaster recovery capabilities.

• Online data migration allows storage administrators to easily redistribute application data to improve performance and move data to lower-cost storage without disrupting business operations.
• Thin provisioning allows customers to purchase less storage hardware up front and easily add capacity as their businesses grow.
• Data replication -- including clones, snapshots, synchronous local mirroring as well as asynchronous remote mirroring -- significantly improves disaster recovery and facilitates data backup capabilities.

"With the introduction of the SVSP, HP is bringing to market an easy-to-use and affordable virtualization solution," said Rich Baldwin, chief executive officer, Nth Generation Computing Inc., an HP channel partner. "Our customers benefit from the ability to virtualize their entire SAN and manage multiple storage resources with a single solution. Complex operations such as data migrations in a multi-vendor environment and remote replication are accomplished easily and efficiently."

The HP SVSP separates data flow from management processes. This innovative architecture means that the processing power needed to handle the data path workloads can scale independently from the resources used for management. As a result, the HP SVSP delivers superior performance and greater scalability than traditional architectures.

"Storage virtualization is a key component of a virtualized IT environment that is flexible, efficient and easy to manage," said Bob Wilson, executive vice president, Storage Platforms Division, HP. "With the addition of the SVSP solution, HP's virtualization solutions span applications, operations management, infrastructure and client architectures. Therefore, HP can protect a customer's critical information while also streamlining their business operations."

The HP StorageWorks SVSP is expected to be available in December.