Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

HP Pushes New Midrange EVA: Page 2 of 3

The EVA4400, which is based on a controller that is separate from the Dot Hill-OEM'd components in the MSA series, offers up to 96 spindles supporting 450-Gbyte Fibre Channel drives, with 1-Tbyte FATA drives due to ship within a couple of months. Also within a few weeks, HP says it will integrate a Brocade 8-Gbit/s 10-port SAN switch into the array.

EVA4400 options include storage virtualization, remote and local replication, HP's "dynamic capacity management" of disk space, and an iSCSI front-end interface for use with filers.

The EVA4400 will compete with EMC's Clariion systems, NetApp's FAS and StoreVault series (which also got an upgrade this week), and IBM's DS3000. Like HP, suppliers of these systems are making a push toward the small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) customer.

At least one analyst sees the EVA4400 as progress for HP. "The emphasis in the midmarket has to be around simplicity and pricing. This announcement appears to have 'bigger, faster, cheaper' covered," says Rich Bourdeau, senior analyst at the Taneja Group.

On the other hand, Bourdeau says HP, like EMC and other traditional SAN players, faces a growing roster of competition from the likes of 3PAR, XIV (recently bought by IBM), Compellent, LeftHand, and others whose architectures are based on clustering and pooled storage techniques that are more scaleable and flexible.