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HP's new EVA: The big reveal

The P6000 could look like ...

HP has told us all that the EVA is morphing into the P6000. El Reg can reveal a little more about this coming P6000 line.

There will be, we understand, two new models. Both will support 2.5-inch SAS disk drives and Fibre Channel (FC) only, or a mix of FC and 1GbitE or 10GbitE iSCSI ports

The P6300 EVA takes over from the current EVA 4400 and has up to 10 drive shelves which can contain up to 120 3.5-inch SAS drives or 250 2.5-inch SAS drives. A drive enclosure contains either large form factor (LFF) drives (3.5-inch) or small form factor (SFF – 2.5-inch) ones and the two types of drive enclosure can be mixed

The larger P6500 EVA replaces the EVA 6400 and supports up to 20 LFF drive enclosures, meaning up to 240 LFF SAS drives, or 18 SFF drive shelves and up to 450 2.5-inch drives. There can be mixing of LFF and SFF drive enclosures with a maximum of 450 drives and 20 enclosures.

The current EVA 8400 remains in play and will do so during 2012. The EVA 4400 and EVA 6400 will cease being available after December 2011. The fact that the EVA 8400 is not being replaced suggests a down-sized 3PAR array will eventually take over its role.

There will be thin provisioning capability, termed "reservation-less", and dynamic capacity management features for both the P6000s and the current EVA products. These capabilities are included in the P6000 Command View licence with no extra price. There will also be dynamic LUN or RAID migration included with no extra cost in the Business Copy licence. Customers will be able to change the RAID level, the disk type and the LUN size while host I/O is ongoing. A LUN can be decreased in size or increased past 2TB and this feature will be part of Business Copy and the Thin Provisioning feature.

Detailed configuration and pricing might become available next week. HP had a common storage platform story. We will wait to see how that pans out now that the 3PAR team has taken over HP StorageWorks. ®

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