HP Launches New Disk Drives

HostReview.com
Monday, July 25, 2005; 09:48 AM

HP (www.hp.com) introduced two Fibre Attached Technology Adapted (FATA) disk drives that better enable information delivery according to its business relevance.

The new FATA disk drives for the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) family provide high-capacity, low-cost storage for data applications that do not require performance-oriented 10K and15K enterprise-class Fibre Channel (FC) disk drives.

The drives better meet customers' tiered storage needs by providing increased flexibility to segment reference data, such as infrequently accessed archived e-mail or medical records and imaging archives, as well as frequently accessed data such as financial transactions.

Based on disk drives from Seagate, the 400 gigabyte (GB) and 500 GB FATA drives from HP provide nearly double the capacity and cost approximately 50 percent less per gigabyte than high-performance FC drives. The FATA drives also share the same EVA drive enclosure with FC high-performance disk drives, thus extending the value of EVAs.

"It has been our strategy to provide customers with drive choices in both FC and SAS environments to better match the perceived business value of their data throughout its lifecycle," said Kyle Fitze, SAN marketing director, StorageWorks Division, HP.

"The new drives for the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array will enable storage managers to blend high performance and capacity with low-cost storage in a single frame," said Brian Dexheimer, executive vice president, worldwide sales and marketing, Seagate.

The new FATA drives will be offered with capacities of 400 GB and 500 GB using a dual-port, 2 gigabit/second (Gb/sec), FC interface. Using the 500 GB capacity, the HP StorageWorks EVA4000 will support 28 terabytes (TB), the HP StorageWorks EVA6000 will support 56 TB and the HP StorageWorks EVA8000 will support 120 TB of raw storage capacity.