I ran across an interesting tidbit on TechTarget's SearchStorage.com website under their Storage Technology News section. It sounds as if some of the executives at Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) have discussed, at least internally, the prospect of their storage blades replacing traditional arrays:
"Jim Wagstaff, vice president and general manager of HP's StorageWorks Division for Asia Pacific and Japan, this week told SearchStorage.com.au that HP "had the discussion internally.
"If you take blades to the nth degree, why have an array dedicated to storage?" he said. "The blades could become the arrays and at that point you question the need for specialized engineering around storage."
Wagstaff feels that customers will appreciate that fact that blade/arrays placing ". . .everything in a single chassis is better for manageability" as well as that "there is a cost advantage for a complete bladed solution."
While HP has performed better than many competitors in the server and blade arena, probably storage too; I think this assessment may be targeted more towards small and mid-sized companies rather than the enterprise.
If you're not familiar with HP's StorageWorks Storage Blade solutions; they are flexible and can be configured to support direct attached storage (DAS), network attached storage (NAS) or a storage area network (SAN) and include Ultrium Tape Blades.
The SB600c All-in-One is a server & storage solution that can support up to 1TB of raw storage using eight 146GB Small Form Factor (SFF), Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives. This product can support shared application storage (iSCSI SAN), file serving (NAS) or data protection (backup). It also includes migration tools for Exchange 2003/2007 and SQL Server 2000/2005, so the product would appear to be a good alternative for an Exchange server or to host SQL Server databases.
The SB40c storage blade is a more traditional DAS solution that is married to an adjacent blade server to provide up to 876GB raw storage by supporting up to six 146GB SFF SAS drives in a half-height form factor.
These solutions seem to be good alternatives for more traditional and larger DAS, NAS and iSCSI SAN solutions, but I would have to seriously consider whether they could replace large-scale storage arrays. What are your thoughts? Can you see this solution supplanting enterprise class storage or are these solutions a better fit for an SMB?
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