Hewlett-Packard, currently one of the largest player in the storage industry, is constantly venturing into ways to further strengthen its growth in this field. The most recent update is an EOM agreement with Quantum, a maker of tape storage solutions. HP will now be manufacturing its tape library based on Quantum’s security-conscious Scalar i6000 product. The i6000 library has 92 drives, a storage capacity of nearly eight petabytes and comes with support for LTO as well as SLT and SDLT formats.

“The Scalar i6000 provides strong security with features such as AES encryption and key manager interoperability protocol (KMIP). The makers claim that the new library will reduce the management time as well as the cost of operation.”

In light of some rising concerns over cloud security lately, Hewlett-Packard is surely looking to protect its storage efforts and extend a higher level of protection to its customers. This business will become critical as the company expands further into the cloud and software solutions space.

Hewlett-Packard had other storage developments this week as well. The hardware giant launched the enhanced P2000 G3 Modular Smart Array and the HP CloudSystem cloud management offering. The company is aggressively expanding its storage business products, and the same can be said from a geographical point of view.

HP announced today that it has appointed Alaa AlShimy to the position of Enterprise, Storage, Servers and Networking (ESSN) Director for the Middle East. AkShimy will begin his new role on July 1. Prior to his current position he’s been with HP for 11 years, most recently as Regional Director for HP Networking for the Middle East, Mediterranean and Africa (MEMA) region. He grew the networking business over four times in a mere two years.

Another company that’s expanding to the Middle East is Huawei. The teleco showcased its cloud offerings in the 3^rd Cloud Computing Summit in Abu Dhabi.