It appears that HP is getting ready to announce two revolutionary EVA arrays, abandoning its proprietary EVA controller design and using SAS drives for the first time. HP's Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) is its mid-range departmental storage array, placed between the workgroup and branch office MSA product and the enterprise …

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Monday 30th November 2009 10:55 GMT Anonymous Coward

How is this new?

And this is revolutionary why?????

Oh right - because it says HP on the box and obviously it's not a standard configuration until HP follow the rest of the herd.

Nothing new here, move along......

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Tuesday 1st December 2009 00:12 GMT Anonymous Coward

Lipstick....

on a pig.

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Tuesday 1st December 2009 01:00 GMT Anonymous Coward

Wow talk about taking the dell route

Cheaper and nastier, come on HP you are renound for good quality, 2.5inch sas drives should not be used in a SAN enviroment of EVA size, ur going after customers who want an EVA but dont want to pay the money for one, what they will end up with is basically just a server and some disks, with all the inherent lack of redundancy that brings. Hurd really is taking HP down the pan... Glug glug glug.

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1. Tuesday 1st December 2009 10:02 GMT Man Mountain
  
  Server and some disks?? And your point is?
  
  Most storage arrays are a pair of servers and some disks packaged as an appliance - IBM's high end DS8000 is a couple of pSeries servers and some disks. IBM's SVC is a couple of Intel servers acting as virtualisation engines. NetApp filers are a couple of servers fronting disks. So not sure what your point is. It sounds like HP are developing a commoditised back end and a scale out front end which sounds interesting to me. The opportunity to have one cost effective infrastructure that I can scale cheaply, and give whatever characteristics I want, sounds good. It sounds like the Netapp Unified storage message without it costing the earth and without it running like a dog when you mix workloads.
  
  And plenty of manufacturers are running SAS drives in their arrays now. And it doesn't say whether the new arrays will replace or sit alongside existing EVA's.
  
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Tuesday 1st December 2009 19:08 GMT Alex McDonald 1

Unified storage? Where?

@Man Mountain; LHN, Ibrix, Polyserve, MSA, XP, and now an EVA that isn't like the current EVA; unified how, exactly?

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1. Wednesday 2nd December 2009 10:21 GMT Man Mountain
  
  Still sounds unified to me!
  
  One of the first things the article discusses is the potential for a single environment that is capable of serving all an organisations requirements - a controller layer, a disk layer and a software layer. So a single, consistent set of commoditised hardware building blocks reducing the costs associated with storage because of the sorts of economies of scale that HP can drive, and the ability to run different application layers on the controllers to give the single storage 'lump' a variety of identities. That would be hugely flexible in my opinion. To me, a single converged infrastructure that can deliver the same functionality that would require a number of different solutions now is pretty unified. You can see this moving towards a genuine one solution will suit all approach - you want extreme performance you buy lots of 'cheap' controllers and faster disks and run EVA or LH identities on the controllers. You want content storage you buy less controllers and slower disks and run Ibrix on the controllers. And it wouldn't be beyond belief to have flexiblity to move identities around to suit changing workloads, maybe even dynamically. And because you have n+1 controllers, you wouldn't get the contention issues you get with solutions like NetApp when they try to be all things to all men. Sounds good to me.
  
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