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Battered HP storage staff deliver plethora of product

New EVAs and a NAS dynamo

HP this week did its best to revitalize a flagging storage line by throwing a ton of new kit out into the wild.

Most significantly, HP firmed up the languishing EVA (Enterprise Virtual Array) storage line with three new systems. The EVA 4000, 6000 and 8000 will replace the EVA 3000 and 5000 boxes that have been around for ages. As you might expect, the new storage servers have much higher overall capacity than their predecessors, and, by offering three boxes instead of two, HP has added choice to the EVA line. The EVA 4000 will ship with 56 hard disks, the 6000 will ship with 112 disks and the 8000 will ship with 240 disks.

HP has watched over the past year as EMC and Network Appliance pounded it in the midrange of the storage market. In addition, the company's storage division has been behind some of its most embarrassing financial misses in recent quarters, prompting management to chastise the storage group again and again. Hopefully, for HP, the new EVA systems will bring some storage sales back home.

HP also released a new product aimed at the high-end of the NAS market called the StorageWorks Enterprise File Services (EFS) Clustered Gateway. This system combines HP's DL380 servers with PolyServe's clustering software to make a file-sharing dynamo. The box can support up to 512 file systems and manage a whopping 8.2PB of data. HP hopes to compete against EMC and NetApp with this box.

On the random hardware front, HP touted a EFS WAN Accelerator for improving branch office application performance over, you guessed it, a WAN by up to 100x. In addition, it highlighted the StorageWorks 6000 Virtual Library Systems for better backup and recovery, some ILM services and new recovery software for Microsoft Exchange databases.

All in all, HP reckons this is its biggest storage launch in history, and the product couldn't come at a better time. Hopefully, some of the team that made it will be around to enjoy the gear in the months to come. ®

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