HP Storage Grid

HP Storage Grid is a strategy rather than an available product. HP are currently delivering the phase1 products of that strategy. However it is worth discussing the whole strategy as the ideas are very interesting.

The basic Storage Grid 'lego brick' is the Smart Cell. A standard Smart Cell will contain commodity hardware, a standard operating system and common software. Specialised Smart Cells will be enhanced with specific storage function enabling software, more cache or specialised hardware.

Storage Cells provide the following services -

Data Services

LUN and file system creation, storage allocation, data access and placement, data copying, backup and recovery

Extended data services

Third party software, Virus checking, immutability, media migration

Content Services

Search, notification, document shredding

External Services

Data import/export

The initial Storage Grid offering is Reference Information Storage System (RISS) document ILM management, which contains a control module with data placement, content indexing, search and retrieval functionality. This manages a set of storage modules, the composite whole comprising the RISS Storage Grid.

Scalable File Share (SFS) is now available, a storage grid for Linux clusters, that can support between 1 TB and 1024TB, with a data access bandwidth or 35 GB/s.

A Storage Grid can be split into domains, but still managed as a single entity. Virtualisation functionality includes dynamic repositioning of smart cells and migration of affected data.

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