High Availability Storage Options and Their Impact on Performance

7
Business Copy and Continuous Access are not supported and there are no plans to release these features
for use on the HP e3000.
Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA)
Not supported for the HP e3000.
Early indications are that it is much faster than the VA Family of storage and has many of the same
features as the VA Family but is a higher storage capacity and connectivity solution.
But is not supported on the HP e3000.
HP SureStore Disk Array XP256
This product was born out of the partnership between HP and Hitachi Storage and was the replacement
for the EMC Symmetrix line (see older white paper) and provided much of the same features but added an
increased array cache, faster disks and provided a host based program to manage/control Business Copy
XP and Continuous Access XP high availability features. Though this product used the Hitachi 7700
Storage hardware frame, HP provides value add with its HP proprietary firmware base. This means that
the XP256 and Hitachi version are different and the Hitachi version will not work with the HP e3000.
Both the XP256 and (older) EMC Symmetrix provided an enterprise storage and connectivity solution for
a heterogeneous server environment with autonomous control within each defined domain or operating
system environment.
Both storage products were originally offered with a number of HVD-SCSI ports/connections and later
the XP256 started supporting fibre channel for HP-UX. Only HVD-SCSI was/is supported for the HP
e3000.
The XP256's much larger cache and faster drives played an important role in improving overall
performance issues caused by Read/Write Cache Misses for the HP e3000.
For a list of supported high availability features for this product please see the
ha & storage matrix at
http://jazz.external.hp.com/mpeha
The XP256 is no longer available from HP but may be still available in the used product market.
HP SureStore Disk Array XP512/XP48
The XP512 and smaller capacity XP48 were HP's entry into 1Gbit per second fibre channel connectivity.
The XP512/XP48 again supported multi-host heterogeneous environments with up to 16 FC ports.
The earlier versions of MPE/iX released during that year (2000) only supported HVD-SCSI so HP
OEM'ed a product from Vicom Systems that (basically) converted HVD-SCSI to 1Gb FC for a direct
connect to an XP512/XP48 (no FC switches or FC hubs). This product is still supported in this
environment and was referred to as the A5814A SCSI Fibre Channel Router.