HP slaps P9500 label on HDS' VSP array

Oh, it's smaller than I expected....

The XP20000 is the next biggest HP array and is a one to two-frame system with up 472TB raw storage. The P9500 appears to fit between it and the XP24000.

HP's P4000 (LeftHand) iSCSI arrays come in P4300, P4500 and P4800 variations, scaling capacity as the numbers get bigger. We reckon the P9500 is an early stake in the P9000 product ground and that there are more models to come. We are looking for a P9000 system that can replace the XP24000, and that means more of everything the XP24000 has in terms of disk, SSD, cache and port capacity - perhaps a P9800 is to be expected.

We think the P9500 will fit above the InServ arrays that HP bought with its 3PAR acquisition.

It will also fit above the mid-range EVA arrays. The Register understands two forthcoming generations of the mid-range EVA array, to be known as the P6000, were shown in a non-disclosure booth at this week's Oracle Open World event in San Francisco.

Mark Twomey, EMC's Champion for Backup Recovery Systems in Dublin, said: "A company with no CEO buys a mid-range storage company with no revenue and has to OEM an enterprise storage product with no innovation. That tidily sums up HP’s activities over the past few weeks.

"What we see in the Hitachi OEM’d P9500 is a very backward-looking design statement, this is monolithic system design circa 2005. There isn’t an inkling from anything here that the P9500 was designed for the Private Cloud concepts being adopted by customers and productised by VMware and the like.

"HP overpaid to the order of hundreds of millions of dollars to replace the rusting hulk that is the EVA with the mid-range 3PAR offering. A product of Hitachi’s glacial development cycle, the P9500 enterprise storage platform isn’t a rusting hulk, [but] its dated ideas are simply not relevant to what’s going on today."

HP has also enhanced its HP-UX 11i v3 and Serviceguard Solutions Portfolio for its Integrity product to simplify computing and improve system resiliency.

The P9500 Disk Array is available world-wide, with list prices starting at approximately €350,000 for a complete system. ®