HP storage upgrades emphasize the SMB market

HP Tuesday announced a number of enhancements to its HP StorageWorks EVA and XP disk arrays, including Internet SCSI (iSCSI) connectivity and integration between its two array lines that should enable users to manage both through a single console.

Analysts said that, with the exception of a new entry-level tape library, the storage announcements are simply small, incremental improvements that individually mean little for most users. But taken as a whole, the upgrades point to an emphasis on the small and midsize business market that HP hasn't shown for some time as well as storage consolidation for the enterprise.

"For the most part, it's about turning the proverbial crank: Larger drives, better performance, more bandwidth, faster interfaces, smaller footprint on its library," said Greg Schulz, founder of research firm StorageIO. "But they're also looking at things holistically."

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HP Tuesday announced a number of enhancements to its HP StorageWorks EVA and XP disk arrays, including Internet SCSI (iSCSI) connectivity and integration between its two array lines that should enable users to manage both through a single console.

Analysts said that, with the exception of a new entry-level tape library, the storage announcements are simply small, incremental improvements that individually mean little for most users. But taken as a whole, the upgrades point to an emphasis on the small and midsize business market that HP hasn't shown for some time as well as storage consolidation for the enterprise.

"For the most part, it's about turning the proverbial crank: Larger drives, better performance, more bandwidth, faster interfaces, smaller footprint on its library," said Greg Schulz, founder of research firm StorageIO. "But they're also looking at things holistically."

Last spring, HP fired a volley of new product announcements around its EVA and XP storage lines, in what most analysts at the time said heralded a comeback from almost two years of deafening silence during the Carly Fiorina era.

Tuesday's announcements again focused on the company's midrange EVA and high-end XP storage array line; plans to move functionality downstream; and smaller form factors in HP's library and backup consolidation technology.

HP said it now offers iSCSI and Fibre Channel connectivity for EVA arrays, which will allow users to plug Wintel server farms into EVAs for backend storage, thereby consolidating their backups across the LAN. Previously, HP had offered iSCSI "kits" -- a ProLiant server acting as a gateway device -- for its EVA line, but the company is now offering an iSCSI router card on the EVA's front end.

HP also said it is supporting 4Gbps throughput on the front end of its EVA and XP arrays, though backend connectivity continues to support 2Gbps speeds.

In addition, the company said it has doubled the existing cache size of its high-end XP arrays for enhanced cache partitioning capabilities in consolidated environments. And it increased the maximum capacity of its StorageWorks 6000 Virtual Library System from a maximum of 10T bytes to 70T bytes by adding support for new 500G-byte drives.

HP announced that its XP array, a rebranded version of Hitachi Data Systems' (HDS) TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform array, now supports connectivity to its EVA arrays, allowing data management from a single workstation. TagmaStore is HDS' high-end array and virtualization platform, which supports multi-vendor array management.

Arun Taneja, founder of the research firm The Taneja Group, said users should be cautious about connecting multi-vendor arrays behind the TagmaStore virtualization device. "That basically means that HP would be at the mercy of HDS and, more importantly, the HP customer would be permanently at the mercy of HDS. Five years from now, all their data is going to be behind a Tagmastore, and if they want flexibility, they won't have that."

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