HP announces fifth generation storage array

StorageWorks XP24000 Disk Array offers double the speed and performance of its predecessor

HP today launched the StorageWorks XP24000 Disk Array, the successor to its flagship storage device, the XP12000 Disk Array. The new large enterprise-class storage system will be available in July, but customers who want the extra capacity on offer can order one today.

HP’s UK enterprise storage product manager, Simon Brassington, said: “We’re using processors with double the speed of those in the XP12000, we’ve doubled the speed of the fibre channel (FC) interfaces end-to-end to 4Gbit/s from 2Gbit/s and we’ve introduced process offloading to give a near 50 percent performance increase to the system when running at its maximum capacity.”

Brassington added that the main new feature now onboard, and one not yet being used by their rivals EMC and IBM, was “thin provisioning”. Thin provisioning is a method for allocating storage to servers or applications on the basis of need, so that even if 1TB (terabyte) of storage is allocated, there may only be 500GB of actual physical storage. Storage admins can then deploy more storage in line with actual application use if they need to, which saves on operating costs.

Internally, the XP24000 supports up to 1,152 disk drives and 332TB of storage and externally can use XP External Storage Software to support and “virtualise” up to 247PB (petabytes) of storage. “We could theoretically take all the XPs and EVAs we’ve sold and virtualise them behind the XP24000,” added Brassington.

Prices for the XP24000 start from around £200,000, but depend on the exact configuration firms choose, said HP’s enterprise storage solutions director for UK and Ireland, Andrew Manners.