by Tara Swords, Sept. 2006
Imagine your luck: A major magazine found your fledgling best-seller online and wrote it up as the "hot new thing." Since then, word of mouth and Internet reviews have driven your business to soaring heights.
Your web site is flooding with new visitors, production demands are at an all time high, your inbox is filling up and that's when it hits you. Has your IT manager been able to keep up with the high data growth rates? If everything crashes, there goes your big break.
So you call IT to hear everything is okay, but it's not. Actually, your storage needs have been increasing steadily for some time now and your system is stretched to its limits. Of course, you rationally, calmly yell: "Fix it NOW!"
If only it were that easy.
Now, it is. Small and medium companies can get everything they need to get started with networked storage in one affordable product, HP StorageWorks All-in-One. Just hook it up, walk through a few configuration wizards, and you're ready to go. Simple and affordable as it is, HP's All-in-One Storage System offers expert storage features to the IT generalist. You don't need to be a storage expert to use it.
Your server environment might seem straightforward enough. A handful of servers have hard disks hanging off them — some simply use internal storage. But this direct-attached setup can sacrifice your business' best interests and be difficult to manage, grow and protect. One server may be filling every gigabyte it's got while another sits half empty. Yet there's no way for one server to share another's disk space. When the storage needs of your application change, hardware has to be adjusted — or even replaced — to keep up with the demand.
Networked storage, on the other hand, shares one pool of centrally-managed disk space among servers. Until now, however, setting up network storage could require up to 35 steps, six different interfaces, several hours and an experienced storage expert (or two). Today, the HP StorageWorks All-in-One turns implementation into a few-minutes-long process. Just plug it in and revolutionize your storage infrastructure in as few as 10 mouse clicks and as little as 30 minutes.(1) Want more storage for your Microsoft® Exchange application? The HP All-in-One will ask you how much and then go behind the scenes to reprovision for you. No need to answer obscure technical questions about LUNs, RAID level, stripe size or iSCSI.
Integrated management tools give small and medium companies the same storage efficiencies enjoyed by huge enterprises. You can manage capacity, security, quotas, alerts, data protection and more through the point-and-click simplicity of a graphical dashboard.
Continually adding storage to individual servers can lock your business into an upgrade and management path that can drain limited resources. Sure, your Microsoft® Exchange server is nearing capacity, but your SQL server has plenty to spare. With direct-attached storage, you have no choice but to spring for additional storage in each individual server or replace the server altogether.
HP All-in-One Storage gives small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) the benefits of networked storage at a price they can afford. It also moves small to mid-sized companies away from the limitations of direct-attached storage.
Microsoft® Windows® administrators can be comfortable with HP All-in-One Storage right out of the box, because its familiar interface operates in terms of applications, not storage. It runs Microsoft® Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 with Microsoft's iSCSI Software target and is built on HP's reliable, industry-standard hardware. That means you can make the best use of current skill sets while enjoying low-cost maintenance and long-term investment protection. Yet, heterogeneous shops will find it just as simple and powerful to use, as HP All-in-One Storage builds on industry-standard components.
Ready to install? Just plug it in. No need to put applications on hold. Your servers see the HP All-in-One Storage as a local hard disk, but now you can easily grow, share and protect that storage while applications remain online.
Sure, your small or medium business has specialized storage needs, but in one important respect, your needs are exactly like large enterprises: You can't afford to lose one iota of data or suffer disruptions in storage availability.
That's where HP All-in-One Storage System shines. A built-in data protection feature can take snapshots of your server data at intervals you choose. No need to shut down any applications. Then, if you need to recover to a previous application state, just roll your servers back to the last data image. You also get HP Data Protector Express for easy backups and redundant hardware to help verify that your data is safe. The system can also send a page or e-mail when it detects certain problems. It also lets you monitor capacity from any place on the local network and set alerts to manage storage growth.
As always, HP-trained service people who understand the unique needs of small to mid-sized businesses are available around the world. Tap the global network of 145,000 HP partners for local assistance and valuable expertise, when and where you need it.
Small to medium-sized companies now have access to the benefits of networked storage, without the need for storage expertise. Get the benefits and functions that your IT administrator could only imagine until now — share capacity between servers, better manage data growth, add an extra layer of data protection with application-aware snapshots, and do it all from a simple, application-centric management interface.
So thank that magazine reporter for featuring your best-selling product in her article, grow your storage with HP's All-in-One Storage System, then sit back and wait for the onslaught of new business, worry-free.
Microsoft and Windows are U.S. registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.
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The above example is based on the migration of a Microsoft Exchange Storage Group database. Your experience may vary based on the complexity, number and type of applications to be migrated, the desired sophistication of networked storage configuration, the experience of the installer and other factors. |
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