HP Takes Storage Line Up A Notch

At its Americas StorageWorks conference this week in Las Vegas, HP will officially unveil a complete refresh of its EVA enterprise modular storage array family and an expanded NAS line geared for the enterprise, said Harry Baeverstad, director of NAS for the company.

HP is unveiling its Enterprise File Services Clustered Gateway, which allows up to 16 ProLiant server-based NAS heads to be clustered to serve files, with the files being stored on SAN arrays from HP, Hitachi Data Systems, EMC and others, said Baeverstad. Increasing the number of nodes boosts performance, he said.

The Palo Alto, Calif., company also is unveiling its EFS WAN Accelerator, an IP-based appliance for speeding up branch office applications, he said.

On the EVA side, HP is updating the EVA controller to offer twice the performance. It is also doubling maximum capacity to 72 Tbytes and doubling cache to up to 4 Gbytes per controller pair, said Kyle Fitze, HP StorageWorks SAN marketing director.

New to the line are the EVA 4000, EVA 6000 and EVA 8000. The EVA 4000 offers 2 Gbytes cache per controller pair, four host ports per controller pair and capacity of eight to 56 hard drives. The EVA 6000 can support 16 to 112 hard drives. The EVA 8000 comes with 4 Gbytes cache per controller pair, eight host ports per controller pair and eight to 240 hard drives. HP plans 4-Gbps Fibre Channel connectivity in the next 12 months, said Fitze.

Rich Baldwin, president and CEO of Nth Generation Computing, a San Diego-based solution provider, said the upgrades will make it easier to compete against EMC's Clariion family.

"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. Now we have three levels, so it's easier to step up."

The Americas StorageWorks Conference will also see HP unveil its new Enterprise Modular Library line, designed to fit between HP's high-end ESL library family and its workgroup MSL family.