Best of TechEd Finalist: With the X5000 G2, HP Serves Up Powerful Storage for Windows Environments

Here at Microsoft TechEd, I had the pleasure of talking with HP’s Jim Hankins about his company’s new HP X5000 G2 Network Storage System, a two-node NAS cluster that features shared storage built on HP BladeSystem technology. The HP X5000 G2 is a finalist in this year’s Best of TechEd awards program.

In this era of exploding data growth in Windows environments, the HP X5000 G2’s use of Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition comes as a welcome addition, delivering a powerful, dense, and yet simplified file-serving experience. Storage technologies such as file deduplication and iSCSI provide unique storage features for this converged file and block I/O NAS appliance. Storage Server 2008 R2 management software simplifies its deployment and management.

HP feels that, put simply, the HP X5000 G2 is the best Windows-based NAS solution for the IT infrastructure. The product backs up that statement not only with its smooth integration into Windows environments but also with its sheer power.

HP shows off its HP X5000 G2 NAS

The system is available in both a large form factor (LFF) and small form factor (SFF) drive chassis. The system is comes in a 3U chassis and internally it can provide up to 32TB of storage capacity. It is expandable to over 100TB externally by using HP D2000 Disk Enclosures. The fact that it is a two-node appliance means it has two X5460sb server blades in the chassis. Each server blade has one Intel Xeon 4 core E5620 processor. The X5520 G2 Storage Server comes standard with 48 GB DDR3 Registered ECC RAM. The RAM is divided into 24 GB per X5460sb server blade and the unit supports a maximum of up to 348 GB per server.

Especially attractive is the fact that the HP X5000 G2 is 100 percent compatible with the Windows environment, supporting Active Directory (AD), System Center, and so on. Everything is preinstalled for a simplified storage experience. You don’t even need to be a storage administrator. And with its all-inclusive software license, it is a surprisingly affordable solution.