Hewlett-Packard Co. and Network Appliance Inc. are building connectors across their respective network-attached storage devices to storage area networks to help customers more efficiently manage their increasing volumes of data.
New software coming from both companies aims to unify storage management by attaching NAS gateways to SANs, thus consolidating file servers and enabling applications to access data from independent NAS devices.
News source: eWeek “Our storage requirements have exploded and gone right through the roof,” said Ramesh Viswanathan, director of computer and network administration at Siemens Corporate Research Inc., a unit of Siemens AG, in Princeton, N.J. “What [users] don’t understand is by bringing all that storage locally [to NAS devices], you’re making it so much harder to manage and back up. … You just can’t do it.”
To help customers seamlessly marry file-based and cluster-based storage architectures, HP in December will launch a new NAS-to-SAN software offering. The product is aimed at users of the HP StorageWorks NAS 2000 device who are looking to repurpose NAS appliances as HP StorageWorks 4000s SAN gateways. Based on the same hardware, the software will be available for a simple license upgrade and offers a clear path for users seeking to migrate to a storage-cluster-capable operating system, said HP officials in Palo Alto, Calif.
