HP converges on itself with bulked up storage offering

HP has upgraded its storage offerings as part of a Converged Infrastructure (CI) announcement, making EVAs clusterable, enhancing mid-range dedupe and introducing a new LeftHand iSCSI box.

It's announced a raft of new servers as well as storage.

CI is HP's integrated IT stack, its response to Cisco entering the server market and building integrated server stacks with EMC and VMware. Since David Donatelli joined HP from EMC to run its ESS servers, storage and networking business, the company has moved to making big quarterly announcements like this rather than streaming them out continuously.

First up is the ability to have pre-built EVA mid-range storage array clusters.

EVA Cluster

HP's new EVA Cluster is a pre-configured and tested factory system using EVA 6400/8400 arrays, with two Fibre Channel (FC) switches and an Ethernet switch included, as well as a Data Path Module (DPM) pair. HP says the DPMs "are intelligent switch-like devices that perform the virtualisation of data at switch-like speeds".

They are sourced from LSI (pdf), which acquired them when it bought StoreAge a few years ago, and contain a Xeon processor and 2GB of RAM. They interconnect host servers with the EVA cluster and virtualise its storage.

A basic 2-node cluster can scale to 624 disk drives and 16 solid state drives (SSD). The 6-node maximum EVA Cluster Domain can have up to 1.9PB of data stored on 1,872 1TB FATA (Fibre Channel Attached, Technology Adapted) drives and 48 SSDs. All the storage is configured into a single virtual pool with a single point of management (Command View SVSP).

Thin provisioning is supported as is LUN migration between the cluster's arrays. The cluster software provides a volume manager, optional SVSP (SAN Virtualisation Services Platform) Business Copy (local replication using snapshots), and SVSP Continuous Access for remote replication. You can expand beyond six nodes by adding another DPM pair and increasing the FC switch configuration with more ports. It's possible to connect selected third-party arrays from IBM, EMC, Sun and SGI as well; not NetApp though, nor HDS.

You can get quick cluster specs here (PDF).

The HP StorageWorks EVA Cluster FIO Starter Kit pricing starts from €59,000 with two EVA nodes.

P4800 BladeSystem SAN

HP has a new P4800 BladeSystem SAN which holds up to 63TB of data across four storage blades with 40 disk drives each. It is intended for virtual desktop applications and works with both VMware View and Hyper-V with Citrix XenDesktop.

The P4800 BladeSystem SAN is a component in HP's CI client virtualisation reference architecture, the first such pre-sized and pre-tested component or template, which is intended to make purchase and deployment fast and simple. HP says it supports up to 1,600 desktop users and claims it does so "at 50 per cent less cost and requires 60 per cent less space than traditional client virtualisation implementations".

The P4800 BladeSystem SAN starts from €190,000.