HP has introduced a new storage array that it hopes will better compete in the fiercely contested midrange storage market.
The new system is the StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) 3000 (EVA3000).
Director of HP's enterprise storage array business, Pete Korce, said it would be the "little brother" to HP's existing EVA5000 systems,
Korce said the EVA3000 would feature 56 drives, totaling 8TB of capacity - significantly smaller than the EVA5000 that came standard with 290 drives and provided 35TB of capacity.
The two systems would be managed the same and possess the same features, such as a continuous access capability, he said.
For now the continuous access functionality, which was a remote replication feature, would only be offered in the EVA5000 and would make its way to the EVA3000 in the third quarter of 2003, Korce said.
HP contends the EVA3000 offers two times the performance of EMC's CX400 Clariion.
"The EVA3000 will set a new standard in the midrange market," Korce said. "It's easy to manage and uses virtualisation, which offers better disk utilisation."
Last week, HP announced a new version of its virtualisation appliance (OpenView CASA) that runs at 1Gbps and comes equipped with 24 ports, 8 more than the previous version.
Vice-president of HP's storage software division, Mark Sorenson, said the new version "exploits HP's new ProLiant servers" that run at 2.8Ghz.
In addition, HP has worked to better integrate the device with its OpenView Storage Area Manager (SAM) software suite, Sorenson said. This allowed the management of CASA through a single console, along with the rest of storage products in the HP line.
CASA supported HP StorageWorks arrays as well as those from EMC Corp., Hitachi Data Systems Corp., and Dell Computer Corp. It also supported HP-UX, Microsoft's Windows NT, and Windows 2000; Sun Microsystems' Solaris; Linux; IBM's IBM AIX; and Novell NetWare operating systems.