HP, IBM Muscle Up Midrange

Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) are stepping up the fight with EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) in the midrange storage array market with the introduction this week of new products aiming to compete with EMC's Clariion product family (see HP Launches EVA 3000 and EMC Moves Downmarket With CX400).

There's no mystery why vendors are rushing to introduce midtier storage products: It is still the fastest-growing segment of the market. The high end of the market has been flat, while, at the low end, new standards like iSCSI are taking a while to gain acceptance (see iSCSI Gets Go-Ahead).

"We are significantly focusing on the SMB [small and medium-sized business] market, because the opportunities are tremendous," says Harold Pike, program director of IBM's midrange SAN solutions. "They're just coming on like gangbusters."

HP today announced its StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) 3000, which will go head-to-head with EMC's Clariion CX400, targeted at the workgroup market and outlying data centers within larger organizations. The EVA3000, shipping now, is available with up to 56 disk drives for up to 8 Tbytes of raw capacity. It falls between the EVA 5000 -- which offers up to 240 disk drives and supports 35 Tbytes -- and the MSA 1000, which offers 6 Tbytes.

"This high-end functionality is now available to the midrange at an attractive entry point," says Howard Elias, senior VP and general manager of HP's Network Storage Solutions group.Rich Baldwin, president and CEO of Nth Generation Computing, a systems integrator and reseller of HP's storage arrays, says plenty of HP customers don't need more than 8 Tbytes of capacity. In fact, says Baldwin, his company has already sold an EVA 3000 to a city government agency in Southern California, displacing an EMC system based on price.

"HP has hit the sweet spot in the midmarket, which its older EVA 5000 didn't reach," Baldwin says. "The 3000 plays under $100,000 and appeals to a lot more clients."

Two months ago, Nth Computing implemented 2 Tbytes on an EVA 5000 at the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), which upon reflection looks like overkill, according to Baldwin. "The EVA 3000 might have saved them some money," he admits. [Ed. note: Oops!] SAG did not return calls for comment by press time. Nth Computing has installed more than 250 SANs in the U.S. since 1998.

An entry-level configuration of the EVA 3000 starts at $63,000 and can range up to $150,000 for larger configurations, while an entry-level EVA 5000 starts at $85,000 and can range up to $1 million for larger configurations. The EVA 3000 comes with all the same software as the larger system except continuous access software, which will be released for the 3000 in the third quarter 2003. HP's continuous access software provides real-time replication by maintaining synchronous, sequential I/O write order preservation.

IBM, meanwhile, this week will introduce the FastT 600, a lower-end version of its midrange storage line (licensed from LSI Logic Storage Systems Inc.) that will take the place of the FastT 200. The 3U-high, 14-disk FastT 600, to be available on April 15, will offer a maximum capacity of 6 Tbytes. EMC's CX200, by way of comparison, has a maximum of 4.4 Tbytes (see EMC, Dell Keep Dancing).The FastT 600, which has a list price of $28,695 for 730 Gbytes, is significantly faster than the older 200 model: It can provide up to 45,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS), compared with 11,800 IOPS for the 200, IBM claims.

IBM also will introduce Tivoli Storage Resource Manager (SRM) Express software, priced at $65 per desktop, which allows customers to perform SRM functions like monitoring and reporting for storage on Windows PCs (see IBM's Tivoli Tightens Its Laces).

Jo Maitland, Senior Editor, and Eugénie Larson, Reporter, Byte and Switch