Yesterday I was in Sophia Antipolis, France for the launch of HP’s EVA4400 virtual disk array. The EVA4400 is aimed at the mid-market joining other similarly-focused products from HP such as the C3000 blade enclosure – or ‘shorty’ to its friends.
The EVA4400 has some badass features, such as automatic partition sizing and integrated management tools that make deploying the thing really easy. In fact, one HP employee informed us that his three-year-old daughter was able to do it.
“HP continues to invest in and expand its portfolio of entry-level storage solutions to address the specific customer business requirements of all market segments,” says Rick Steffens, HP’s vice president and general manager for SAN StorageWorks. “Other SAN environments typically create significant management overhead, but the powerfully simple EVA4400 is the better solution for midsize businesses since it is easier to configure and automates storage provisioning to improve capacity utilisation. Plus, it is approximately 20 percent more affordable than higher end systems.”
The simplicity in deployment of products like the EVA4400 is making it possible for customers to roll out infrastructure themselves and evolving the roll of vendor partners. Don Langeberg, HP’s Midrange Arrays StorageWorks Division marketing manager says that partners are increasingly focusing on their added services, but that big opportunities still exist in deployment and implementation with tools that now make it easier for them to do basic roll-outs with their own offerings bolted-on.
HP is boldly launching the product in the same week as Microsoft’s WAVE launch of its Server 2008 products, with the EVA4400 supporting many of the new Windows Server’s features.
While any new Windows’ server is usually met with a wait-and-see approach by customers who sometimes plan enterprise-wide infrastructure upgrades based on new server releases, Kyle Fitze, marketing director for HP’s SAN offerings is of the opinion that customers will be moving to the EVA4400 regardless of their decisions to upgrade to Server 2008. HP considers it an almost natural progression for users of previous EVA products to make an immediate upgrade to the EVA4400 as soon as it becomes available. I suppose this is possible in the case of a storage system with its own intelligence and dedicated management.
Regardless of initial adoption rates the EVA4400 seems a compelling option, not only for mid-market businesses but for enterprises with basic array requirements too. HP also claims it is severely faster than its closest competitor.
The EVA4400 is now available for order with a European price-tag of 15000 Euros.