HP Adds Solid State Drives, Boosts Storage Virtualization

HP (NYSE: HPQ) is adding to its data storage product portfolio with new solid state drives (SSD) and broader support for storage virtualization.

The offerings include the new Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) 6400 and 8400 storage systems, HP SAN Virtualization Services Platform 2.1 (SVSP 2.1) and a new version of HP Data Protector software, and are aimed at virtual storage and server environments.

The products help users get the most of their storage environments, said Kyle Fitze, HP’s director of marketing for storage platforms. The new EVA 6400 and 8400 arrays can save users half on management costs compared to traditional arrays, said Fitze, citing an Edison Group comparison of HP, EMC (NYSE: EMC) Clariion and NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) FAS arrays.

The new storage systems include support for solid state flash drives from STEC and virtualized RAID-6, which HP says offers the data protection of RAID-6 with the ability to automatically grow and shrink data sets.

The arrays also boost LUNsize and cache, and they support a range of applications from the likes of Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) and SAP (NYSE: SAP) and virtual operating systems such as Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware (NYSE: VMW) ESX Server, Citrix (NASDAQ: CTXS) ZenServer, Oracle Virtual Machine and Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) Enterprise Linux Virtualization.

SVSP 2.1 includes greater performance and scalability and broader support for a host of storage arrays from competitors, including EMC, NetApp, Sun (NASDAQ: JAVA), IBM (NYSE: IBM), 3PAR (NYSE: PAR) and SGI (NASDAQ: SGIC).

By pooling storage resources and managing them centrally, HP says users can more easily allocate capacity to virtual servers, migrate data between arrays and replicate data to a remote site. SVSP 2.1 supports volume management, thin provisioning, copy services, synchronous/asynchronous mirroring, data migration and data replication. It uses a split-path architecture to separate data flow from management processes to maintaining SAN availability and performance.

And HP Data Protector software has been integrated with the EVA arrays and SVSP for better VMware Infrastructure data protection and backup, and also provides support for data de-duplicationthrough certification with third-party target devices such as Data Domain (NASDAQ: DDUP) and optimized integration with HP’s own de-duplication devices like the HP StorageWorks D2D and VLS.

Pricing for the EVA6400 and EVA8400 starts at $24,240 and $61,456, respectively. An EVA 6400 with a typical 15TB configuration, including 300GB 15K drives, Fibre Channel drive enclosure, rack and Command View management software, would cost $188,860, while a fully configured 27TB EVA8400 would cost $339,904. HP StorageWorks SVSP2.1 software lists at $37,180.

Back to Enterprise Storage Forum