Symmetrix: Vast, fast storage
HP is selling the EMC devices to offer customers a way to maintain disk
farms of more than 80Gb in a single device, the limit of its Model 10 and
Model 20 High Availability Disk Arrays (see last month's NewsWire for details). The EMC units were first supported with PowerPatch 6 of
MPE/iX 5.0, and HP made them available in October.
With a capacity of more than ten times that of Model 10 and 20, the Symmetrix takes on storage requirements that HP 3000s haven't needed until recently. "We see the [Model 10 and 20] as the low to mid-range, while we see the Symmetrix 3000 as a high end disk array," said Vicky Symonds, the CSY product manager for peripheral devices.
The other advantage of the Symmetrix products is their ability to work as a storage device across several kinds of computer systems simultaneously. A single storage unit can serve both HP 3000s and HP 9000s, as well as IBM mainframes and other systems. It can be divided, and it is configured through a dedicated EMC system console. Customers can re-allocate storage capacity among hosts when application needs change.
In addition to its flexibility, the array also offers speed increases over what HP calls Just a Bunch of Disks (JBOD). Database loads, indexing, batch update and ad-hoc updates are two to four times faster. Complex queries such as joins, data reduction and table scans execute from 50 to 140 percent faster, and even simple record lookups and backup operations are 25 to 75 percent faster.
The Symmetrix gets its speed in large part from ample cache sizes. Caches up to 4Gb resolve a traditional bottleneck in RAID technology, because all read and write operations are directed through the cache. HP believes that the devices will give customers using 99x Corporate Business Systems an immediate performance boost without upgrading their 3000s.
The speed comes at a hefty price. The lowest-cost system starts at $251,000, delivering 70Gb of storage and 512-Mb cache. As cache and storage capacities increase, so do prices. Symonds identified a "sweet spot" in the lineup of the Series 3200 system, which ranges between $436,000 and $1.1 million for 140 to 279 Gb of storage.
Support for the system comes though EMC, although customers can call HP's Response Center to initiate a service call. The systems can contact EMC technical support themselves, too, tapping diagnostics to head off trouble before it happens. EMC can identify a hardware component that's nearing failure, then send an onsite technician to replace it before it goes out of service.
DDS-3 & DLT: Fast and faster tape
HP also introduced the first DLT and DDS-3 tape drives to the HP 3000 line
as part of its Series 979KS rollout. The DDS-3 unit almost doubles the
performance of the current DAT drives for 3000s, transferring at 3.5Gb per
hour. The new tapes also hold 12Gb each, a three-fold increase over DDS-2
units.
An internal DDS-3 unit is priced at $3,799, and external units are $3,899. HP had given a "not to exceed price" during the initial 979 rollout briefing of $6,500 but revised the figure downward. DDS-3 units are sold as rackmounted and embedded as well as standalone devices. HP manufactures the units in its Bristol Tape operation. DDS-3 drives can read DDS-2 and DDS-1 tapes, Symonds said.
The Digital Linear Tape units are an HP OEM version of the Quantuum 4000 devices. HP said it's backing away from its optical storage solutions in favor of the DLT drives, which have up to 40-Gb capacity for each cartridge and a transfer rate of 5.4Gb per hour. This speed is a major improvement over the optical solution, Symonds said. HP's selling the DLT only as a standalone device, priced at $7,980