Today HP made an announcement in regards to their storage products that made many across IT yawn a little bit. It sounds like the EVA line has been consolidated into the 3PAR products. The new product is the HP 3PAR StoreServ 7000. HP claims a “guaranteed” 50% savings in efficiency using hardware enabled thin technology and autonomic tiering without performance tradeoffs. HP claims “effortless” administration without the need for a storage expert while reducing management time by 90%. Autonomic management utilizing self configuring, self optimizing, and self provisioning techniques are the terms used in the “effortless” administration of the new product. HP claims to eliminate inflexibilities and boundaries that block the changing business needs with the new “bulletproof” storage system.
HP claims to have Tier 1 features now in economy size allowing businesses to double their VM capacity without doubling their storage capacity. The virtually limitless scale makes the new product future proof by providing the ability to upgrade pieces of technology within the product at any time. Where the announcement becomes interesting is the claim by HP that this eliminates the distinction between mid-range and Tier 1 class storage. The new product can be delivered for less than $40,000 at a Tier 1 level. Now HP has a single architecture that can deliver common Tier 1 data services from the redefined mid-range of $25,000 to the high end and newly named HP 3PAR StoreServ 10800. HP has essentially eliminated class distinction between mid-range and Tier 1 storage by delivering common services across the board.
I will watch the announcements and look for further information in the future to write about. While this announcement isn’t ground breaking, it is a great move by HP to allow customers to grow as their storage needs increase. I think the HP online import for EVA is one of the best pieces of the announcement allowing customers to “easily” migrate EVA data to their new 3PAR storage.