HP Launches XP10000 Disk Array

Hewlett-Packard Monday unveiled StorageWorks XP10000, a disk-array storage system aimed at the upper end of midsize customers.

The XP10000 can be configured with a maximum of 240 drives and 48 Fibre Channel ports, providing up to 69 terabytes of internal storage capacity, according to the company. The higher-end XP12000, which has been shipping for nine months, can be configured with a maximum of 1,152 drives and 224 Fibre Channel ports, providing up to 332 terabytes of internal storage.

The XP10000 is intended for customers with high-availability applications and no tolerance for downtime, yet without the need for the massive scalability of the XP12000, says James Wilson, XP product manager at HP's StorageWorks division.

The XP10000 replaces the XP128 as the entry-level edition in HP's XP product lineup. "From a price and scalability viewpoint, it's geared at the higher-end of midrange customers, not [small and midsize businesses]," says Natalya Yezhkova, senior research analyst at IDC.

Although the XP10000 has some overlap with HP's EVA8000, introduced in May, the products are aimed at different audiences, Wilson says. For customers with high-performance application requirements, such as online transaction processing, or who are operating in a mainframe environment, the XP10000 is ideal, the company says. The XP10000, with its large number of ports, also is best suited for customers that want to do storage-area network consolidation. The EVA 8000 is a better fit for customers running in a Windows or HP-UX environment, he says.

Like the XP12000, 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.

HP also unveiled Command View XP Advanced Edition, an enhanced storage-management product, and Snapshot XP, which provide multiple, real-time replication of data from XP10000 and XP12000 disks to space-efficient secondary volumes. The system only replicates data that's been rewritten, making it ideal for environments where input-output to the secondary volume is read-intensive or relatively infrequent.