HP announced its first dedicated storage blade, which provides customers with quick and efficient storage expansion to enable greater flexibility within IT infrastructures.

The company also introduced two offerings within the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) family to accelerate back-up and recovery, reduce costs and make storage area networks (SANs) simpler to manage.

The HP StorageWorks SB40c storage blade can add up to 876 gigabytes of direct attached RAID storage capacity to each blade within an HP BladeSystem c-Class enclosure. A key enabler of HP’s Adaptive Infrastructure portfolio, storage blades help companies improve their IT organisations by speeding change and delivering improved cost efficiencies and quality of service.

Based on industry-standard components, including small form factor Serial Attached SCSI drives and an embedded SmartArray P400 controller, the SB40c’s density and power efficiency accommodate the space and power constraints of data centres. In addition, the storage blade offers simplified and automated storage and server management via HP Systems Insight Manager and Integrated Lights-Out tools.

The processing power of BladeSystem c-Class server blades, combined with the SB40c, provides the performance and capacity needed for demanding applications such as file and print, mail and messaging, video streaming, databases and distributed file systems.

“HP’s continued innovation and investment in its StorageWorks portfolio are providing customers with greater choice and more affordable options to meet their storage needs,” said Bob Schultz, senior vice president and general manager, StorageWorks Division, HP. “New offerings like the SB40c are helping HP lead the way for customers that want to simplify their IT infrastructures.”