HP began offering its highest capacity disk drive to date for HP 3000s as well as a third-party software solution for managing networked backups during its May introduction of hardware and software for HP 3000s.
The disk drive is a 9Gb device that customers have been expecting since early this year. The A3628A and A3629A subsystems are offered in single-ended and fast/wide SCSI models respectively and cost $2,970. A Fibre Channel version of the drive is scheduled for delivery in 1998.
HP says the new drive reduces the price of mass storage from about 36 cents per megabyte on its 4Gb drives to 27 cents a megabyte. The drives can also be used in the HP High Availability Storage Systems (HASS) multi-drive enclosures.
Customers will need to upgrade their operating systems to MPE/iX 5.5 and add a patch to use the new drives. A device-specific patch, MPEJX95, which is in general release enables HP 3000s to use the drives. HP will also include the 9Gb patch in MPE/iX 5.5 Express 3, due out in September. The drives are shipping immediately.
HP's Dave Snow said that the new device is a good match for customers who have large amounts of data but don't access it very heavily. "A high level of I/O transactions can bring you to a single choke point quickly" using only one such large drive, Snow said.
Legato Networker ships
HP also announced that it's now selling the client portion of Legato's Networker
backup solution for HP 3000s. The software, priced between $750 and $6,000
per HP
3000 depending on CPU size, lets managers include 3000s in backups across
networks
that can include Unix, Windows NT and NetWare servers as well as Windows and
Macintosh clients.
The backups, however, are controlled by a Unix or Windows NT server component in the first release of the product for MPE/iX. This means directories of file locations are stored on a non-HP 3000 system, because Legato's solution doesn't have a server module that runs under MPE/iX. HP says it will offer this server component in early 1998.
Legato officials reported that as of presstime no firm deal had been cut to bring the server side of the solution to the 3000. Ed Cooper, director of strategic marketing for the company, said HP and Legato are working out plans on how HP will approach its 3000 customers to do the primary offering of the server module, "since markets such as these have been leveraged by our OEMs."
HP says one advantage of the solution is its support for backup devices with autoloader capabilities. Networker can back up the systems listed above to as many as 16 different storage devices. The directory software for working with media and file indexes is accessed through a graphical user interface.
HP said that Networker can work in tandem with its TurboStore 24x7 True Online backup software. Customers who want IMAGE/SQL and TurboIMAGE databases backed up without taking users offline will need some kind of backup software in addition to Legato's. Networker does such online backups for Oracle databases on HP 3000s, but not for Allbase/SQL or IMAGE. HP said it has made some minimal changes to TurboStore to let the software work with the Networker client under MPE/iX. TurboStore now writes data to a memory buffer whose contents are then provided to the Networker client. Networker also works with versions of TurboStore for the 3000 other than True Online.