HP Plans to Add Block Storage Service
As Hewlett-Packard gets set to make its public cloud compute service available this week, the company is already planning to upgrade the portfolio to include block storage.
HP released the high performance, high availability service, called HP Block Storage, to private beta today. The company didn't disclose when it will release a public beta, when the service will be generally available or how much it will cost.
The new service will allow customers to add storage volumes up to 2TB per volume and they will be able to add multiple volumes atop of HP Cloud Compute instances. Customers will also be able to create snapshots of their volumes to create point-in-time copies, allowing them to create new volumes from the snapshots, which can be backed up to HP Object Storage for added redundancy if needed.
With the current private beta, users must manually create backups but HP said it will release an API to automate the process. Gavin Pratt, a senior product manager for HP's Cloud Service, said in a blog post the service will appeal to enterprise customers requiring high availability. "Using RAID, along with other high availability techniques, your data will be preserved even if an entire hard disk or RAID controller fails," Pratt wrote.
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Comparison chart of HP's different cloud storage service options. Source: Hewlett-Packard Company. (Click image to view larger version.) |
HP's Cloud Block Storage will appeal to those who require additional capacity on top of their compute instances as well as those who want to ensure data from compute instances persist beyond the life of a specific virtual machine," according to Pratt. "Additionally, it's perfect for applications & databases where you need to perform reads and writes concurrently with high IOPS performance," he said.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/08/2012 at 1:14 PM