HP to Ship ProLiant Servers with Smaller, SAS-Based Drives

Hewlett-Packard Co. within the next two months will begin shipping ProLiant servers with multifunctional network adapter cards and smaller hard drives.

Those moves, along with support for RAID 6 for greater data protection, are designed to simplify the infrastructure and improve manageability in the data center, said Paul Perez, vice president of storage, networking and infrastructure for HP's ProLiant servers.

The new capabilities will begin appearing in the ProLiant systems—which run on processors from Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.—in May, Perez said. Over the next 12 months, the features will begin appearing in all servers in HP's ProLiant, Itanium-based Integrity, BladeSystem and StorageWorks systems.

The multifunctional adapter card will bring networking, storage and clustering features onto a single connection point, he said. The new adapter cards have been shipped to five beta customers already, and HP is expanding that beta program, he said.

Analysis
HP is first to market with two important advances in technology. The new network interface card will tie storage and Ethernet communications. Serial Attached Storage (SAS) combines the best of SCSI, fibre channel, and ATA disk drive technology in a common chassis. Buyers will see products like these from all the major computer companies this year. These are two technologies worth investing in, sooner rather than later.

Peter S. Kastner