Offering regional and national programs, CIO (and CSO) events bring together some of the most respected names and thought leaders in information technology and security. Presented by CIOs and other senior level executives, these invitation-only programs offer timely topics and strong networking. Learn More »
Public Council Teleconference: Application Rationalization — Hidden Costs and Smart Decisions
November 17 at 11:00 am US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Honorio Padrón, of The Hackett Group, who will share the drivers for companies to tackle application rationalization and the results of research that define the hidden cost of complexity. Additionally, we will discuss key decision milestones—to start or not, holding the course steady and fulfilling expectations.
Virtual Desktop Cost-Benefit Analysis — Michael Jacobs, Catlin Group
The analysis contained in this presentation measures the cost of everything from the machines and licenses to the infrastructure for virtual vs. traditional desktop environments.
Honor your best senior team members - Apply for the CIO Ones to Watch Award
Get well-earned public recognition for your top up-and-coming team members, your IT organization and your enterprise. Award winners will be announced, publicized and feted in May 2010, great timing to help attract new IT recruits to your company.
Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »May 06, 2008 — IDG News Service —
To help IT departments prepare for the coming onslaught of data, HP on Tuesday introduced a platform that combines storage and computing in one rack with a single file system and management console.
The HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage System (ExDS9100) is designed for enterprises facing bigger challenges in storage than in computing. Those include Web 2.0 companies such as photo-sharing and social-networking sites, as well as specialized industries such as genetics, oil and gas, said David Roberson, senior vice president and general manager of the StorageWorks division.
Demand for storage is doubling every 18 to 24 months, and within five years, Roberson expects to see a "yottabyte year" when the industry as a whole ships one yottabyte, or 1,000 exabytes, of storage capacity. HP is investing heavily in this area because it sees a big opportunity: Enterprises will be putting much of their focus and spending there in the next two years, Roberson said. Currently, 45 percent of all hard drives in the world, from PCs to data centers, are sold by HP, he said.
Managing many terabytes of storage is far different from taking care of a few hundred gigabytes on a PC, said Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Mark Peters.
"You reach a point where just the sheer scale of what you're managing becomes the problem," Peters said.
Many vendors are moving toward this kind of platform, including IBM, with its recent acquisition of Israeli startup XIV, and EMC, Peters said. But the ExDS9100 promises to be a good solution because of the care HP is putting into it, he said.
"There's nothing huge, bulk, cheap, easy to use, that's already on the market," Peters said.
The ExDS9100 will help companies scale up their storage and computing capacity and more easily manage that capacity, according to HP. Today, in organizations with large amounts of data, it may take several administrators to manage one petabyte of data. HP wants to turn that around so a single administrator can manage several petabytes, Roberson said.
The platform consists of an HP BladeSystem chassis with room for 16 blade servers, in a rack that also accommodates storage controllers and high-density "storage blocks" with as many as 82 hard drives. A base configuration will consist of four blade servers and three storage blocks, with 246T bytes of storage. Customers will be able to add either type of capacity independently of the other. One rack will hold as much as 820T bytes, but an extra rack of storage can be added for a total of 1.64 petabytes.