HP announces the X5000: A Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 cluster!
I am on the floor of HP Discover, the premier event of the year for HP hardware and software solutions. I am really impressed by the breadth of products, services and solutions that HP has to offer. They just announced today the newest addition to the Windows Storage Server family, the X5000 G2 NAS! This solution is a two-node failover cluster and will hold up to 32 TB of fast SAS storage in a tiny little 3U form factor:
This is a sweet package of technology that I really believe will be a game changer for highly available Windows Storage solutions. This single chassis contains two modular blades running Windows Storage Server 2008 R2, which has all the great capabilities of Windows Server 2008 R2 and we add a bunch of storage features.
This new box looks very nice, and if you’ve seen the recent performance numbers from the current line, you know you can get a single box that is able to serve up tens of thousands of users! Checkout this blog from Tom Joyce. There is a new whitepaper that just came out that shows how HP and Emulex can deliver support for 26000 users from a single box.
I really like the fact that the X5000 will bring some big savings to customers:
- Reduce power utilization by 58%
- Reduce cooling by 63%
- Reduce the footprint by 50%
The analysis done by HP is pretty clear that their current line of servers are so fast that it is actually cheaper to buy a new HP server and consolidate a bunch of old servers into the new box and resell those old servers. Just the power savings alone can achieve ROI in just a few months, that is a pretty compelling reason to consider retiring old hardware.
Here are Jim Hankins the product manager for the X1000 & X3000 Network Storage Systems and Curtis Gailey, performance engineer on the storage team, these guys know NAS! If you are at HP Discover, stop by and say Hi!
I’m excited to see this new system come to market this fall! Great job guys!
Scott M. Johnson
Windows Storage Server