HP Introduces New High-capacity, Low-cost 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. In addition, data is easily moved between lower-cost-per-gigabyte drives and high-performance drives within a single storage system based on application performance and data access requirements.

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.(1)

By combining higher capacity, lower cost FATA disk drive mechanisms with an FC interface, the drives address the need for businesses to cost-effectively store infrequently accessed information in a more economical fashion and with performance that is faster than traditional tape.

"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. "These new FATA drives demonstrate our ongoing commitment to delivering on that promise with the flexibility that the EVA provides."

Used in conjunction with the drives, HP StorageWorks File System Extender (FSE) data management software provides high-availability, protection and recovery capabilities. Customers can define policies to identify files for movement from high-performance storage to lower cost storage. Rules can be created to maintain active data on the high-performance FC storage systems and move inactive data to the lower cost FATA storage.

Combined with FSE, the drives can be configured to store single or multiple copies of archived files for resiliency against failures and disasters. Additionally, FSE has both restore and recovery options to protect the archived data and the archive in case of hardware or software failure without the need for a backup and recovery product.

"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. "These enhancements allow customers to better respond to new business challenges and increased storage demands."

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.

Additional features include: