Our first presenter was Jim Powell from the Office of the CTO for StorageWorks, who gives us a candid vision and state-of-StorageWorks information.

I almost miss it, but Ray Lucchesi (RayOnStorage) catches this gem: humans are creating an exabyte of data per day.

Briefly:

IBRIX. IBRIX allows for the integration of several disparate storage systems into a single, unified file system using its Fusion file system. It solves two distinct enterprise storage problems: high capacity, and high performance. With IBRIX, infinite capability scalability, just-in-time scalability, and better manageability are a few of the benefits of deploying it.

HP BladeSystem Matrix. Instantly adjust to dynamic business demands, double administrative productivity, with an investment payback within a year, all on a product built on industry standard architecture.

BTW, do you know that you can automate LeftHand deployments using HP Storage Essentials?

Next up was Todd Mottershead from the ProLiant development team.

Todd was animated, and extremely passionate about what convergence meant to HP. I was particularly impressed with his belief that whatever the technology was, it was meaningless without it being useful to end users, a position of which I couldn’t agree with him more.

Then the new HP x500 Data Vault was rolled out.

Based on the consumer HP MediaSmart Server, and running the Windows Home Server Operating system, this is a more powerful unit, and optimized for business environments where more reads and writes are performed. We will ask for, and test this 10-user (device CALs) device with a view to determining if it is indeed suited for the business environment.

Fairly subsequent to that, the Tech Day was declared closed. I, however, stayed behind to record a podcast with several of the bloggers there for the weekly StorageMonkeys.com podcast.

As I go off the grid for the next few days, I will continue to write my HP StorageWorks Tech Day report, and post it, however sporadically.

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