HP has expanded its low-end storage offerings unveiled last year, adding what the company says is the first storage array to support either SCSI or Serial ATA (SATA) disk enclosures behind a single controller shelf.
The new StorageWorks Modular Smart Array (MSA)1500 adds SATA support to the company’s previous SCSI offerings, giving companies that need to store data for longer periods of time to meet compliance or business requirements “a type of storage that is fast for recall, but not as expensive as primary disk storage,” says Kyle Fitze, director of marketing for HP’s Online Storage Division.
“By integrating low-cost SATA hard drives and enclosures with existing SCSI drive enclosures and Smart Array controller technology, the MSA1500 offers customers the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of a low-cost tiered storage solution while protecting existing hardware investments,” the company states.
With pricing starting at $8,995, the MSA1500 is also part of a trend targeting storage area networks (SANs) at small and medium businesses (SMBs). The product is also well positioned for Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), since SAS backplanes will support SATA drives. Fitze says “SAS is definitely on the roadmap, with availability in the 2005 timeframe.”
HP also added the StorageWorks MSA20, a SATA disk drive storage enclosure with Ultra320 SCSI host connectivity, for “an ideal mix of low cost and high capacity for minimum I/O workloads such as reference data, archival and disk-to-disk backup.” The product joins the MSA30 SCSI disk enclosure released last year.
HP says the StorageWorks family is unique in that it allows customers to migrate SCSI disks and data directly out of an HP ProLiant environment to a StorageWorks MSA disk array. Combined with HP’s Universal Hard Drive strategy and common management tools, HP says the offerings protect customers’ investments and make it easier to move from direct-attached storage to storage area networks.
The MSA1500 is a Fibre Channel SAN attached 2U controller shelf that connects to HP StorageWorks SATA and/or SCSI disk enclosures. The MSA1500 offers up to eight attached SATA enclosures for as much as 24TB (using 96-250GB SATA disk drives) of raw capacity. As many as four SCSI enclosures can be attached for raw capacity up to 8TB (using 56-146GB SCSI disks).
The MSA20, a SATA disk drive storage enclosure with Ultra320 SCSI host connectivity, starts at $2,959.