HP's New High-end Storage System Scales to Twice the Capacity of the Competition Without Disruption

Business Wire, Sept 7, 2004

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- HP StorageWorks XP12000 Delivers Low-cost, Tiered Storage for 50 Percent Savings on Additional Disk Capacity

HP (NYSE:HPQ) (Nasdaq:HPQ) today introduced the industry's most powerful, high-end disk storage system, which scales to more than twice the capacity of competitors' offerings and delivers "zero downtime" for mission-critical customer environments. The new HP StorageWorks XP12000 Disk Array is based on the newest array technology from Hitachi, Ltd. combined with HP software innovations for single-system management, remote copying and cross-continental disaster recovery.

The new array also includes support for low-cost, tiered storage that can offer more than 50 percent cost savings over enterprise-class Fibre Channel drives with the management simplicity of a single virtualized storage pool.

HP additionally announced HP NonStop server support for the HP StorageWorks XP family, including the HP StorageWorks XP128 and XP1024 systems. Support for the XP12000 is expected in the first half of 2005.

"The XP12000 demonstrates HP's commitment to continually offer storage products with higher performance, availability and enhanced features that meet the storage challenges of our business," said Aaron Neinhuis, team leader, Unix Administration, Priority Health. "All of the XP12000 components are redundant and hot-swappable to provide extreme reliability and availability -- which gives us peace of mind."

The HP StorageWorks XP12000 offers virtually seamless online scalability to provide customers with the flexibility to start small and massively scale capacity without the expense, complexity, risk or downtime required with forklift system upgrades and data migrations.

Customers can scale the system from as few as nine disk drives and 1 terabyte (TB) of raw capacity to enterprise-class data center configurations of up to 1,152 drives and raw capacity of 165 TB using 146-gigabyte (GB) drives -- or up to 332 TB of capacity with 300-GB drives, expected to be available in the first half of 2005. This breakthrough scalability helps to enable data center consolidation with pay-as-you-grow pricing and investment protection benefits.

The XP12000 also provides enterprise customers with the flexibility and cost benefits of low-cost tier storage capability, while providing the management simplicity of a single-system image. The XP12000 enables customers to optimize capacity utilization and performance through the ability to host up to 32 petabytes of non-mission-critical data on lower cost external storage devices.

External storage support includes the HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Array (MSA) 1000 -- featuring support for SCSI drives that can offer more than 50 percent cost savings over enterprise-class Fibre Channel drives -- and the existing family of HP StorageWorks XP systems. HP will provide future support for the HP StorageWorks MSA1500 disk array, supporting either SCSI or low-cost Serial ATA disk enclosures behind a single controller shelf.

"Customers require storage solutions that provide the availability, scalability and storage efficiency to keep pace with the escalating rate of data volume growth, while maintaining service levels and cost structures," said Dianne McAdam, senior analyst and partner, Data Mobility Group. "HP's new StorageWorks XP12000 provides customers with the solution to overcome these challenges."

Value-add software and solutions for business continuity

The HP StorageWorks XP family is based on HP's original equipment manufacturer relationship with Hitachi, Ltd. HP extends the business value of Hitachi high-end array technology by leveraging HP's expertise -- not only in storage, but in networking, servers, operating systems, applications and services -- to deliver complete and comprehensive enterprise solutions.

HP StorageWorks XP12000 protects customer's mission-critical environments from application downtime due to fault, failure or physical disasters with new and enhanced software and solutions for business continuity. Using new HP Cluster Extension XP software, customers can easily integrate XP remote mirroring functionality with open-system high-availability server clustering solutions to provide continuous availability across geographically dispersed data centers that may be continents apart. HP Cluster Extension XP also provides rapid and automatic fail-over and fail-back between sites to simplify management and reduce the cost and complexity of deploying heterogeneous disaster recovery solutions.

The XP12000 also supports enhanced array-to-array remote copying through a new journaling capability with HP StorageWorks Continuous Access XP Journaling. This functionality enables the XP12000 to more rapidly send increased amounts of data between arrays at multiple customer sites located hundreds of miles apart. Continuous Access XP Journaling enhances the robustness of data transfer for improved efficiency and performance. Expected availability of XP12000 journaling features is early 2005.