HP on May 16 is expected to revitalize its storage family with the introduction of a slew of products designed to give customers more flexibility in storing data center and remote-office information.

The company says the announcements will constitute its most important storage launch ever and signal that it is ready to erase its mistakes of the past. HP saw its market share slip last year, to put it in the No. 2 position.

HP's StorageWorks disk storage business accounted for almost $7.6 billion in revenue in 2004, according to IDC. But HP's storage revenue fell 6.3% from 2003 to 2004.

At its StorageWorks user conference in Las Vegas, HP is expected to roll out:

• Three new models of its midrange Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) - the EVA40000, 6000 and 8000 external disk storage systems.
• A series of appliances that speed data access and file sharing between remote offices and the data center.
• A clustered gateway product for consolidating file services in remote offices back into the data center.
• A virtual tape library for open systems - Windows, Unix and Linux - environments that lets IT use disk to emulate tape backup.
• A modular tape library for mid-range enterprises.

The launch of the new EVAs, the StorageWorks Enterprise File Services (EFS) and the virtual tape library will make for a much more comprehensive storage portfolio.

The refresh of HP's EVA products has been much anticipated. It will fill out HP's family of midsize enterprise storage arrays and offer midsize companies a scalable choice for storage. While HP declined to comment on the new EVAs or any of the other products it will announce, documents downloaded from HP's Web site detail the capabilities.

"HP is making a comeback in storage," says Arun Taneja, founder and senior analyst for Taneja Group. "These announcements bring HP a heck of a lot closer to competing with EMC and Network Appliance."

According to IDC, in 2004 EMC took the No. 1 position away from HP for external disk storage systems. EMC showed a 21.1% revenue share, followed by HP with 18.7%.

The EVA4000 has a maximum capacity of 16.8T bytes; the EVA6000 scales to 33.6T bytes; and the EVA8000 has a maximum capacity of 72T bytes using 240 drives, twice the capacity of HP's previous StorageWorks EVA5000. The EVA8000 supports connections to as many as 256 servers.

In addition, the EVA8000 is more than twice as fast as the EVA6000. The storage arrays can intermix fast Fibre Channel and less-expensive and lower-cost Fibre Channel drives.