HP To Unveil New EVA Arrays, Tape Libraries

The new EVAs will make their public debut in Las Vegas at HP's Americas StorageWorks conference, to be held starting May 16, said Kyle Fitze, HP StorageWorks SAN marketing director.

The key hardware change in the EVA line is a refreshed controller that allows a doubling of performance, an immediate doubling of capacity to 72 Tbytes with more than 200 Tbytes possible in the future, and a doubling of cache to up to 4 Gbytes per controller pair, Fitze said.

New to the line are the EVA 4000, with 2 Gbytes cache per controller pair, four host ports per controller pair and capacity of eight to 56 hard drives. The EVA 6000 is similar, but capacity ranges between 16 and 112 hard drives. The EVA 8000 comes with 4 Gbytes cache per controller pair, eight host ports per controller pair and capacity of eight to 240 hard drives

Rich Baldwin, president and CEO of Nth Generation Computing, a San Diego-based solution provider, said that while the upgrades are more evolutionary than revolutionary, they nevertheless represent a big move for HP and its channel partners.

For Baldwin, the fact that HP is moving to three models of EVA compared with the two models in its current EVA family will make it easier to compete against EMC's Clariion line.

"Before, we might go in with an EVA 3000 thinking we'd compete against a Clariion CX300," Baldwin said. "But then EMC might tweak the offer, jump to a CX500. But for us, if we want to move to the next level, we'd have to jump to the EVA 5000, which is a giant step. It priced us out of the deal. Now we have three levels, so it's easier to step up."

With the EVA 8000, HP can now go head-to-head against the Clariion CX700 thanks to its eight host ports per controller pair, said Baldwin. "They've leveled the playing field," he said.

The expansion will help a lot when it comes time to fill a request for proposal, Baldwin said. "In reality, few RFPs are really open," he said. "In a lot of cases, customers hire a consultant or integrator who try to position the specs in the RFP to favor what they sell. I don't see any significant features EMC can claim now for their side of the fence."

By lifting the maximum storage capacity limit from the existing 35 Tbytes of the current EVAs to more than 72 Tbytes with current hard drives and more than 200 Tbytes with higher-capacity drives in the future, the sky's the limit for customer applications, said Baldwin. "For archival or data warehousing purposes, those high capacities are not unreasonable," he said. "Fifty Tbytes is very common today."

In addition to the hardware upgrades, HP is adding new software support, including fast recovery capability for Microsoft Exchange and SQL servers, said Fitze. "This is middleware that sits between a local replication or business copy and the Exchange or SQL data so that if the data gets corrupt, the software can automatically move to a clone copy of the data without bringing the application down," he said.

Also new is failover support via software applications from such vendors as Veritas Software and Microsoft, Fitze said. While that capability was also possible with the EVA 3000 and 5000 models, it used HP proprietary software, he said.

In addition to failover support, HP is rolling out other industry-standard support not previously available to its EVAs, including native host-bus adapter support, which Baldwin said is important when dealing with operating systems other than Windows or Linux. For instance, he said, to connect an IBM server using AIX to an EVA used to require the purchase of an expensive third-party host-bus adapter.

"Following industry standards makes it easier to configure and install the arrays," said Baldwin. "And it's better for multivendor environments, a big plus."

The new EVAs are already shipping in limited quantities. List price for an EVA 4000 with 3.5 Tbytes, the rack, installation and startup services, two-year support and software is about $124,000, said Fitze. An EVA 6000 with 6.7 Tbytes lists for about $221,000, while an EVA 8000 with 14 Tbytes lists for about $409,000, he said. About 50 percent of EVAs are sold through the channel in the United States, he said.

Going forward, HP plans to add 4-Gbps Fibre Channel capabilities over the next 12 months and make additional enhancements, Fitze said. Then, in 2007 or 2008, he said HP will move its storage line to the next level, based on grid computing.

The Americas StorageWorks Conference will also see HP unveil a new line of tape libraries, said Adam Thew, director of marketing for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based vendor's nearline business.

Called the Enterprise Modular Library, it was designed to fit between HP's high-end ESL library family and its workgroup MSL family, Thew said.

The new EML family, scheduled to ship May 16, comes in three flavors. The EML 103e will have 103 slots for a maximum capacity of 41 Tbytes using up to four LTO 3 drives, with a maximum throughput of 1.15 Tbytes per hour. The EML 245e's capacity tops out at 98 Tbytes with up to 230 slots with up to eight drives. A fully configured EML has 407 slots for up to 177 Tbytes of capacity and up to 4.6 Tbytes per hour using up to 16 drives.

The libraries allow customers and solution providers to slice the capacity into up to six partitions for use with different operating systems or to separate data backups from archived data, said Thew.