Features - Storage Innovations:

HP GROWS StorageWorks EVA MRKT WITH CLUSTERED HP-UX SUPPORT

HP has expanded the market reach of its HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) with enhanced clustered support for HP-UX, one of the industry's top rated UNIX operating systems. HP also introduced an entry-level EVA that allows customers with lower capacity requirements to take full advantage of the benefits of the system's virtualization architecture. The system's virtual architecture delivers outstanding performance, ease of management and significantly higher capacity utilization than traditional storage systems.

Customer adoption of the HP StorageWorks EVA has accelerated since its introduction in October 2001: In the past six months, the number of petabytes shipped increased by nearly 200 percent over the system's first six months of availability. Growing demand for the EVA includes repeat business as well as new implementations.

"HP continues to set the pace for the storage industry and, in the modular market, customers are choosing our EVA," said Howard Elias, senior vice president and general manager, HP Network Storage Solutions. "Customers instantly recognize the benefits of our virtualized architecture, and the EVA's momentum is a testament to the return on information technology customers can achieve with an adaptive storage infrastructure."

HP's EVA system has rapidly delivered cost savings, ease of management, reliability and increased efficiencies to a wide variety of customers. Recent additions to the EVA install base include AFFINA, Hackensack University Medical Center, SM&P Utility Resources (a subsidiary of the Laclede Group Inc), Maritz Inc and Spardat.

On Oct. 2, the HP StorageWorks EVA became the industry leader in open systems workload environments with record-breaking results for a controller pair based on the Storage Performance Council Benchmark-1 (SPC-1), which is designed to represent real-world application environments. The system's input/output per second performance in a storage area network environment was more than 50 percent faster than its nearest competitors and remains the top result for a dual-controller array.

Second-year Enhancements: Entry-level Model

HP designed its EVA for highly complex, demanding environments and has added robust HP-UX certified support with HP MC/Serviceguard clustering and SecurePath high-availability software.

Based on customer response to the EVA, HP has extended its capabilities in modular and mid-range storage with a smaller configuration, the HP StorageWorks EVA Model 2C2D. This competitively priced system provides utility-like, grow-as-you-go storage.

Customers can start with as few as eight drives and easily enlarge the configuration up to as many as 240 drives as their business demands increase. The system's virtual architecture ensures that upgrades are transparent without any interruption in service as data is automatically load-balanced across increasingly larger physical pools of disk drives.

The EVA Model 2C2D model is available now. A fully populated 2-terabyte configuration is priced at a suggested U.S. list price of $181,678. More information on the HP StorageWorks EVA is available at www.hp.com/go/storage.

About HP

HP is a leading global provider of products, technologies, solutions and services to consumers and businesses. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, personal computing and access devices, global services and imaging and printing. HP completed its merger transaction involving Compaq Computer Corporation on May 3, 2002. More information about HP is available at www.hp.com.

Contact: Don Gentile of HP, 408-447-4410, don.gentile@hp.com.