HP Discover: HP boasts of 100,000 times faster data queries with storage updates

FRANKFURT: HP has unveiled a raft of updates to its Converged Storage portfolio including a new series of HP StoreServ systems and analytics tools aimed at the mid-market.

Speaking in Germany at the firm's 2012 Discover event, Dave Donatelli, executive vice president of HP's enterprise group, said the updates were vital as storage requirements have changed dramatically among firms of all sizes in the last few years.

"Most major storage architectures sold today are quite old, they were designed some 15 to 20 years ago, and yet we've seen huge change; the rise of the internet and the evolution of the datacentre such as datacentre as a service and software-defined datacentres," Donatelli said.

In response, HP has this week unveiled products designed to focus on three key areas of storage - primary storage, backup and analytics - with a specific focus on the mid-market, which Donatelli said the firm estimates as having a potential value of $11bn.

HP's new StoreAll product is designed to allow firms to store huge amounts of data for future analysis.

David Scott, general manager for HP storage, explained that as such it can handle up to 16 petabytes of data and has capabilities such as meta-data tagging to aid the analytical requirements of firms looking to take advantage of the huge growth in unstructured data.

It does this by utilising new data mining technology developed in HP Labs called Express Query.

"This is a noSQL database that allows you to offload extremely complex search-based algorithms that you need to find data to reduce the processing power that's required, and allow you to search instantly in the file and object based system," Scott explained.

"In the past if you were to query 500 million files using traditional search techniques, it would take 42 hours to answer the question ‘Which files changed in the last four hours?'. If it takes that long you can't keep data very fresh.

"This [Express Query] allows you to do the same calculation in 1.4 seconds - this is 100,000 times faster than traditional systems."

The firm also touted its capabilities to link this with its analytics tools served by Autonomy, through its IDOL platform.

"What's really exciting about this is we are finally pushing intelligence and analytics down to the storage layer and this gives us the ability to deliver rich insight at a scale no other company can do," said Brian Weiss, vice president of information governance at Autonomy.