Roundup: HP, IBM, EMC

Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

HP's new Storage Federation Technology. HP (HPQ) expanded its converged storage portfolio with HP Peer motion, new federated storage software that enables clients to transparently move application workloads between disk systems in virtualized and cloud computing environments. Available to LeftHand and 3PAR, Peer Motion delivers a peer-to-peer storage federation capabilities that span from a virtual storage area network (SAN) software appliance to midrange and high-end storage systems. This enables clients to respond to unpredictable environments with federated workload balancing, increase the return on investment with federated thin provisioning, and improve productivity by moving data from retiring arrays to new systems nondisruptively with federated asset management. HP also introduced new HP P10000 3PAR Storage Systems, featuring the delivery of enterprise IT within public and private clouds, called IT-as-a-Service. The two new models, the V400 and V800 (HP 3PAR V-Class) are powered by the unique capability delivered by the HP 3PAR Gen4 ASIC. The ASIC makes management easier by autonomically load balancing all data within the array in one click as new resources are added to the system, giving 1.5 times greater port connectivity and disk resources, and consolidating unpredictable workloads. HP VirtualSystem and HP CloudSystem solutions featuring the HP 3PAR V-Class Storage System are expected to be available later this year and start at a list price of $288,633. HP 3PAR Peer Motion is a separate software product available for an additional charge.

IBM empowers partners for Netezza appliances. IBM announced that after the successful integration of its 2010 acquisition of Netezza, the company has launched a global initiative to help its Business Partners expand their analytics portfolio with IBM Netezza appliances. IBM will help partners with sales, marketing, and technical resources to market and sell Netezza to industries such as financial services, healthcare and energy and utilities. "Business analytics is going mainstream and IBM's goal is to arm its partners with the right skills and support to help our clients take advantage of this trend," said Arvind Krishna, general manager, IBM Information Management. "These resources are geared to make it easy for our partners to quickly infuse Netezza into their business model."   Specifically IBM will hold global skills bootcamps for partners, allow partners to bring clients into Innovation Centers for proof of concepts, offer a Software Value Plus program and a Software Value Incentive. On September 15, IBM will host a worldwide Webcast that details how IBM Business Partners can take advantage of these resources to market and sell Netezza appliances.

Iomega announces rackmount network storage for SMB.  Iomega, an EMC company announced the worldwide launch of the new Iomega StorCenter px12-350r Network Storage Array, a powerful next-generation network storage solution delivering the highest levels of performance and advanced data protection for small-to medium-sized businesses and distributed enterprises. The new px12-350r is geared for the small and medium size business market as it supplies a maximum of 36 terabytes of network storage for prices less than $10,500. The array supports Hyper-V Live migration, multiple RAID levels and hot swap drives, certification for the most popular virtualization environments, and native support for Avamar deduplicating backup. "As the flagship of our most advanced and powerful business class of NAS devices, the px12-350r incorporates the latest in high performance technologies including solid state disk drives, expanded memory and 3TB 7200 RPM disk drives, as well Iomega's Personal Cloud technology and the only network storage array in the world to natively support Avamar deduplicating backups. The px12-350r is truly advanced network storage that can be the foundation for today's high growth SMBs and distributed enterprises," said Jonathan Huberman, president of Iomega. The new Iomega StorCenter px12-350r is available immediately and is available in a 8TB model ($5,999.99) and a 12TB model ($6,999.99).