Company also updates its NAS line Hewlett-Packard on Monday announced it is shipping a storage device that connects remote servers to a storage area network through the use of the recently ratified iSCSI protocol.The product, dubbed StorageWorks SR2122 iSCSI storage router, was designed exclusively for HP by Cisco Systems. The device has the ability to bridge and route storage data between an IP-based array and a Fiber Channel (FC) array, said Mark Nagaitis, director of product marketing for HP’s infrastructure and NAS division.“We provide technology when technology is needed,” said Nagaitis. “iSCSI has moved past the hype and our customers are looking at it now.” Nagaitis envisions the SR2122 iSCSI storage router being used to connect servers in remote sites to connect back to the FC-based SAN and to connect servers that don’t need as much performance, or for companies that don’t want to buy and install another host bus adapter in a given server.The SR2122 has two Gigabit Ethernet ports and 2Gb FC interfaces for connecting to the SAN.Nagaitis further clarified HP’s IP storage strategy by explaining that HP is a protocol-independent vendor and wants to support its customers end-to-end. He concluded that iSCSI will not replace FC but will complement and coexist with it in storage networks.On Monday, HP also relaunched its entire line of network attach storage (NAS) products under the belief that NAS products should be connected to SANs. Charles Vallhonrat, manager of product marketing for HP’s infrastructure and NAS division, said this strategy allows enterprises to share a single pool of storage to do both block and file storage. The new NAS devices are the HP StorageWorks NAS b2000, b3000, and e7000. The b2000 is a 2U-high system with three 146Gb drives. The b3000 scales to 27TB, and the e7000 features 78.2GB of internal storage.Vallhonrat said the new platform gives a 25 percent performance improvement over HP’s old line with the introduction of speedier Intel Xeon 2.8GHz processors, as well as a price reduction of about 42 percent by its own estimations. Technology Industry