HP Unveils New Storage System and Partner Program

The storage industry headlines from this week included:

HP Unveils New Storage System and Partner Program.  HP (HPQ) announced new offerings that include the next generation of its MSA entry disk array, enhancements to the HP StoreEasy Storage portfolio, and a new program for HP channel partners. Available under its Simply StoreIT program, the new HP MSA 2040 Storage system is up to four times faster than similarly priced solutions. The MSA 2040 is built to support increased bandwidth, along with a high-performance controller and solid-state disk (SSD) performance, which will support increasing workloads and maximizing dollar per input/output operation.  An enhanced HP StoreEasy Storage portfolio enables customers to store, manage and protect unstructured data for thousands of concurrent users. The products are aimed at small and midsize businesses (SMBs) and government agencies to help them maximize storage investments. "Virtualization and other emerging workloads threaten to drown SMBs in a sea of complexities that hinder, rather than support, growth," said David Scott, senior vice president and general manager, Storage Division, HP. "Simply StoreIT allows our partners to serve their small and midsized customers who are stressed for time, budget and resources."

StorageQuest Announces Flash Storage Appliance. StorageQuest announced the public availability of its StorageQuest Flash Storage Appliance (FSA). The new hardware provides high throughput storing and retrieval over the network to an array of sixteen removable Compact Flash chips, with capacities ranging from 1GB to 256GB per Compact Flash for a total online capacity of 4TB.  Each device includes an optional copy of StorageQuest Archive Manager, which includes advanced features such as Read and Write Caching, Remote Replication (Cloud, RAID, Optical Libraries or even additional Compact Flash mediums). "This new product leverages the popularity, availability and price of industry standard Compact Flash media and transforms it into a portable archival and retrieval storage system,” according to Brendan Lelieveld-Amiro, Director of Product Development. “It’s current application lends itself well to the Security and Intelligence communities looking for portable, automated long term archiving of evidence data.”

IceWeb Selected by NASA. Unified Data Storage appliance provider IceWeb announced that it has made a sale to the National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA). NASA chose the IceBOX cloud collaboration platform because it meets the NIST FIPS 140 encryption requirements which will allow them to implement a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) solution that keeps the agency FISMA (Federal Information Security Management Act) compliant. The IT administration and auditing features of IceBOX were also instrumental in winning this business. "There are three major constituencies with mission critical requirements in every BYOD implementation whether it’s in a large enterprise or a small business—the End-User community, the Internal IT community and the Legal/Regulatory community," said Rob Howe, IceWEB CEO. "You don’t get to cherry-pick which community you are going to serve. You must serve them all if you are to be a truly viable BYOD solution. Obviously, all those communities were represented in this sale, and all of them gave IceBOX their ‘thumbs-up.’ So it’s clear that with IceBOX, we pass the usability, the security/administration and the auditability tests. That’s what makes the IceBOX such an exciting and useful product for any size organization no matter how critical and complex the data."

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