By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
March 8, 2010

Underscoring the need for business continuity in times of crisis, IT equipment vendor HP on Friday unveiled its new line of StorageWorks XP disk arrays, which feature disaster-proof makeup that enable businesses to go on despite calamitous circumstances.

“Disasters can cripple and even kill companies,” said Chris Powers, director, XP business unit, HP. “Disaster recovery [systems] are therefore important, especially in times when power is lost or when earthquakes and typhoons strike.”

The age-old practice of mirroring data centers, according to Powers, doesn’t ensure that businesses are going to continue operations when systems fail. “You don’t want to go through manual intensive process of mapping everything across your data center [after recovery],” he explained.

In a demonstration before members of the press on Friday, Powers showed a video that exemplified the new disk arrays’ disaster-proof capabilities. In an initial test run, HP engineers shot a bullet through the stack, with the system remaining intact and running. “Users probably didn’t notice what just happened,” Powers noted.

As if that wasn’t proof enough, the same HP engineers prepped up the StorageWorks racks and blew them all up, completely obliterating the system. In just a matter of 14 seconds, a system running OpenVMS failed over to the backup site, ensuring continuity very quickly. The system running Linux was the last to fail-over, at a rate of about two minutes.

“Investment on business continuity systems becomes relevant if you size the impact of a simple power loss to the entire business infrastructure,” Powers remarked. “If you transact business online, just imagine how much impact taking your site offline is going to have.”

Aside from being disaster-proof, HP’s new disk arrays are also proven to “effectively utilize” installed storage through virtualization. “Legacy storage can’t scale. For constant data ability, StorageWorks XP arrays can scale up to two petabytes whenever needed,” Powers said, adding that this process ensures that there are no trapped capacities in separate storages.

The new disk arrays release is part of HP’s continuing drive towards a converged infrastructure. “We want to encourage businesses to shift their investments from simply maintaining their systems to actually spending on technologies that add business value,” Powers pointed out.

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