By Calvin Zito

In my first post, I gave an overview of the March 10 announcement we did.  In part 2, I gave a bit more color to the StorageWorks piece of the announcement.  Today, I want to talk about the new EVA6400 and EVA8400 that were announced.  If you're already familiar with the EVA and it's virtualizated pool of disk drives, you can skip down to my heading titled "What's New"?

The EVA was first announced in 2001.  We've shipped nearly 70,000 EVAs and nearly half of that has been in the last few years.  Why so many more over the recent past - because we've been able to substantiate the ease of use benefits of the EVA and with the growth of data, I think more and more customers understand that the EVA is the easiest mid-range array to manage in the industry. 

So as a short primer for those of you that maybe don't understand EVA virtualization, I'll briefly summarize it here.  At it's core, virtualization is a logical abstraction of the underlying physical widgets (whether your talking servers, storage, network, etc).  With the EVA, we are virtualizing at the storage system level to hide the underlying physical disk drives so that what you manage is a pool of capacity.  These pools of virtual capacity can be configured as virtual disks and presented to any or all connected hosts.  The EVA capitalizes on virtualization to provide optimal performance, ease of management, improved capacity utilization, powerful data replication tools, and faster rebuild times, while simplifying the management of the virtualized storage capacity.   There's a lot more that we could talk about here on the EVA's virtualization capabilities but for now, I'll point you to the white paper titled Storage virtualization and the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array.  It is a good resource to get you going on the EVA and virtualization.

What's New?

So that brings me to a discussion on what's new.   There are two new EVA models - the EVA6400 and EVA8400.  They join the EVA4400 that we announced about a year ago when we refreshed the low end of our portfolio; this announcement refreshes the rest of the EVA family.

Here's a summary of what's new:

• Support for Vraid 6 providing double the parity of Vraid5 while providing the virtualizations benefits to grow and shrink the Vraid set. Vraid6 is unique to the EVA compared to traditional arrays that deliver only RAID6.
• Increased maximum LUN size up to 22TB to support applications needing larger LUNs like Microsoft and Oracle and we have also increased the number of LUNs supported (NOTE: updated this as I had a typo here in the original post.  The EVA8400 supports either 14TB or 22TB of cache)
• Introducing 72GB solid state drives (SSD) to support high I/O low latency applications. The EVA supports up to 8 SSD's in an array.
• The EVA8400 scales to 324 disks and 324TB while the EVA6400 scales to 216 drives and 216TB. With support for the same disk drive enclosure that's supported in the EVA4400, the new EVA's offer increased performance density---more performance in the same footprint
• Increased cache up to 32GB for improved application read and write performance
• Increased our snapshots from 16 to 64 for increased flexibility in data mining and restores

Here are a few things you can play with to learn more about the new EVAs.  The first one is a very cool 3D interactive virtual product tour.  This allows you to see a 3D view of the EVA, zoom in, turn it around and really "play" with what the EVA looks like.  There are two of these 3D tours, one for the EVA6400 and one for the EVA8400.   Here is also a Flash-based product demo that gives a high level picture of the new EVA models.  The demo has a tab titled "see it in action" - this is a simple description of how virtualization in the EVA works.  Check these out and let me know what you think.

One of the main benefits we highlighted in the announcement was that the EVA costs up to 50% less to manage than other competitive traditional disk arrays.  I'll discuss this more in my next post.