The AVA ??

Anyway Ive been out of action recently with a nice kidney infection so have missed out on some of the news and stuff going on in the storage world and have been playing catch-up the last few days.

One interesting thing that I noticed was that Dave Roberson has swapped HDS for HP.  Obviously the he felt the grass was greener on the other side………. actually, is HP even classed as “the other side”?  Anyway one obvious plus for Dave is the immediate increase in productivity he will realise by not wasting as much time spelling his email address to colleagues - @hp.com is full letter shorter than @hds.com!

The interesting thing about this move though, and Ive not seen anything written about it, is what impact this might have on the EVA.  We already know that HP resells Hitachi’s high end storage as the XP.  But as of this moment in time HP have their own midrange offering in the EVA.

There are obviously several directions this could go in, including, but not limited to, those listed below –

• Nothing will change
• The EVA will be end-of-lifed and HP will start reselling the AMS/WMS midrange kit
• The best features of the EVA and the AMS/WMS will be taken, thrown into a pot, and a new modular array will be born
• Hitachi will end of life the AMS/WMS range and it will be replaced with the EVA

Ive tried to list them above in order of likelihood (the top one being the most likely) – in my humble opinion of course.

I personally would be very disappointed if the EVA was end-of-lifed.  Ive said it before and I’ll say it again, I think when it was first released it was ahead of its time and still has some really cool features that we don’t see enough of elsewhere.  One of my favourites is still the wide back end striping and the way it will re-distribute the load (re-level) if you add more disks on the back end.  Of course I know its had its problems in the past and in many ways I think they were a reflection of the problems that the HP StorageWorks division was having in general.  Problems at the top and in the background inevitably manifest themselves on the playing field.

Number 3 in the list above is the most exciting, albeit unlikely, prospect in my opinion.  A hybrid of the EVA and the AMS, call it the AVA (Adaptable Virtual Array).  Stranger things have happened….. at least I think they have ;-)

Anyway, long live the EVA.  If it does die, I might have to pick me one up from E-bay for posterities sake.

Thoughts welcome as always.

Nigel