Hewlett-Packard Adds to StorageWorks XP Line

Hewlett-Packard last week unveiled a disk-array storage system aimed at midsize customers who have high-availability applications, no tolerance for downtime, and don't need massive scalability, says James Wilson, XP product manager at HP's StorageWorks division.

StorageWorks XP10000 can be configured with a maximum of 240 drives and 48 Fibre Channel ports, providing up to 69 terabytes of internal storage. The XP10000 replaces the XP128 as the entry-level edition in HP's XP lineup, which scales to the XP12000, which has been shipping for nine months and can have up to 1,152 drives and 224 Fibre Channel ports and provide up to 332 terabytes of internal storage. "From a price and scalability viewpoint, it's geared at the higher end of midrange customers," says Natalya Yezhkova, senior research analyst at IDC.

For customers with high-performance application requirements, such as online transaction processing, or who operate in a mainframe environment, the XP10000 is ideal, HP says. With its large number of ports, it's best suited for customers that want to do storage-area network consolidation. The XP10000 supports storage virtualization, enabling the implementation of tiered storage applications using internal and external storage capacity. It also supports multiple operating systems such as HP-UX, Windows, Linux, and OpenVMS.