News

posted on 07 February 2008 14:23

 HP has announced its SME-class MSA2000 arrays offering both iSCSI and Fibre Channel SAN connectivity.

These MSA (modular storage arrays) are priced to be affordable to small and medium enterprises with a feature set making them suitable for larger enterprise remote office and department use or as either a secondary or tertiary tier of storage.

The enclosures can have 48 3.5-inch serial-attached SCSI (SAS) or serial ATA (SATA) drives or both, and come with either a 4 Gbit/s Fibre Channel (FC) interface or a 1Gbit/s Ethernet one. The maximum capacity is 36TB, meaning that 750GB, 7.2K rpm,  SATA drives are used but not 1TB drives (- yet).

The SAS drives spin at 15,000 rpm and come in 146 or 300GB capacities. A 500GB SATA drive is also available. There is a 13-drive base enclosure with three 12-drive expansion closures available to make up the 48-drive upper limit.

HP says the product is designed to work well with VMware ESX servers. The enterprise-class features include dual power supplies, optional dual controllers and redundant hardware with automatic failover (dual active-active controller models).

A  so-called persistent cache does not need battery backup.

That's the benefit of using non-volatile RAM (NVRAM).

RAID levels 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 50 are offered. There is optional management for snapshots and clones enabling rapid data backup and recovery. This is done by the array controller and not a host server. However there is no replication facility. (EMC has promised this feature for its AX-4 product.)

The product comes in with a built-in management console for set-up and configuration.  

HP says the MSA2000 is designed to integrate with its BladeSystem and fits into that management environment, enabling, the company states, customers to configure all their blades at once instead of one blade at a time.

The MSA2000 SAN storage can be used for file serving if front-ended by HP ProLiant Storage Servers or an HP StorageWorks EFS Clustered Gateway.

Robin Hensley, Entry Storage VP for HP StorageWorks, said: “Customers will benefit from consolidating their storage and can take advantage of features like snap and clone to protect their data and deliver value to their business.”

The new product, a major advance on HP's existing MSA1000, compete's with EMC's AX-4 (And Dell's version of that product).

MSA200, full name: HP StorageWorks 2000 Modular Smart Array, starts at a $4,999 list price (c£2,500 at ordinary conversion rates) with general availability expected in March