HP Unveils Low-Power, 24/7 Disk Arrays

The new package is the latest enterprise product to come from HP's long-term joint engineering and OEM relationship with Hitachi.

Hewlett-Packard, which has made so secret of the fact that it has made the small to midsize business market its No. 1 storage sales priority in 2007, introduced May 14 its first high-end disk array since last fall.

HPs StorageWorks XP24000 Disk Array, which is designed for enterprise environments that require 24/7 business continuity, integrates directly with HPs other servers and storage networking products to provide a complete disaster-tolerant system, a company spokesperson said.

The Palo Alto, Calif., company last announced a new storage product for the high-end market in October 2006, when it introduced a high-performance blade server and ultra-high-speed gateway.

The XP24000 is the latest enterprise disk array product to come from HPs long-term, joint engineering and OEM (original equipment manufacturer) relationship with Hitachi Ltd. of Japan.

The new arrays upgraded processor and provisioning technology offer increased performance and substantially lower power consumption than previous XP arrays, a company spokesperson said.

"IT risks are now business risks as data loss or downtime of any type can mean millions of dollars in lost revenue," said Rick Steffens, vice president and general manager of storage area networks for HPs StorageWorks Division. "We are introducing an environmentally responsible alternative that mitigates these risks and far surpasses price and performance levels of competing systems."

Unlike systems from EMC and IBM, the XP24000 features thin-provisioning software that lowers overall data center costs by automatically allocating disk capacity from a virtualized pool of storage as needed. XP StorageWorks Thin Provisioning Software also reduces unnecessary power consumption and heat generation by reducing the total number of disks required in typical configurations, the spokesperson said.

The XP24000 platform provides complete redundancy and unique data replication capabilities for complex, heterogeneous storage environments. (A video demonstration of the disk arrays qualities is available here.) The array also features hot-swappable components, nondisruptive online upgrades and dynamic partitioning.

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The XP24000 system is also able to consolidate and manage heterogeneous storage environments. HP StorageWorks XP External Storage Software can virtualize HP and some third-party storage, providing lower-cost, multitier storage solutions in an easier-to-manage storage environment.

In addition, the XP External Storage Software integrates storage resources while aiding in data migration, array repurposing and tiered storage. The XP24000 also supports up to 247 petabytes of external storage for virtually unlimited growth.

The XP24000 offers 4G-bps connection to disk drives and hosts, and supports up to 1,152 disk drives and 332 terabytes of capacity. The new array features a peak performance range of up to 3.5 million I/O operations from cache.

HP said the StorageWorks XP24000 is expected to be available in July. The company will continue to sell and support previously announced XP disk arrays, including the HP StorageWorks XP12000 and XP10000 Disk Arrays, the spokesperson said.

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