HP is racing to the rescue of those threatening to drown in their own data, but that Web 2.0 lot had better be able to hold on until the fourth quarter when HP can deliver what it calls “Extreme” storage, the NAS-style ExDS9100.

It’s a 10U BladeSystem that can hold 820TB of SATA-based data and through the wonders of HP’s PolyServe clustering can be strung together into a multi-petabyte system – along the lines of what EMC is promising to do with Hulk and Maui widgetry – that can be managed by a single administrator.

Its $2-a-gigabyte cost sounds utterly reasonable until you do the math. A full-fledged system will run you north of $1.5 million. One saves on the cost of, say, administrators.

The applications accessing the data run on the blades, eliminating a software tier. HP says the box was designed to provision performance and capacity independently for greater flexibility in matching capabilities to workloads.

HP sees it for digital media firms as well as the Web 2.0 crowd, oil and gas, surveillance and genetic research, not to mention cloud computing.

A base solution starts with four blades, good for 20MB-a-second performance that can scale to 16 blades with 12.8 cores per unit good for 3.2GB-a-second performance. It starts with 246TB capacity and goes to 820TB.