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HP has unveiled a new storage array that drops the entry fee to $15,000 for its Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) midrange line.
The EVA 4400 replaces the EVA 4100 for 20 percent less while boosting performance, functionality and scalability, and places the company at the bottom of the $15,000 to $50,000 midrange market, as defined by IDC, according to Kyle Fitze, director of marketing for the HP StorageWorks SAN division.
That also puts it just above the recently announced MSA2000 — at twice the capacity.
“It gets you into the midrange portfolio for $15,000, and does it in a way that allows you to scale,” said Fitze.
To demonstrate the new array’s ease of use, HP is citing Edison Group papers that claim IT managers spend as much as 75 percent less time managing the EVA compared to competing arrays from EMC and NetApp.
“After working with both the EVA4400 and EMC products, I would definitely choose the EVA,” Buzz Kaaz, director of IT at Georgia-based Pattillo Construction, said in a statement. “The interface was easy enough to use that I could do it myself and save the cost of hiring a consultant.”
The EVA4400 also offers high-end virtualization features like a dual-redundant hardware architecture that supports local and remote replication software. Storage provisioning is available with HP StorageWorks EVA Dynamic Capacity Management (DCM) software, and there’s also HP SmartStart software for simplified setup and configuration.
The HP StorageWorks 8Gb Simple SAN Connection portfolio offers 8-gig Fibre Channel technology for the EVA4400 for the same price as 4-gig. It includes management software, a 20-port capable 8Gb switch and a PCI Express host bus adapter (HBA).
