FEATURE ARTICLE (A0007):

A deal has been renewed between Hewlett-Packard and Hitachi, to continue to make high end storage disk arrays through 2008.

The computing giant and Hitachi extended a technology deal. Hitachi will use its high end disk array technology and HP will add its software to the products resulting in the HP storage-works XP products, which are designed for data centers in large organizations.

HP has sold 4,000 StorageWorks XP units since inking the original deal with Hitachi. Price tags for the systems, which can hold up to 1,024 hard drives and up to 149 terabytes of data, can go up to $1 million, Schultz said. IBM, EMC and Hitachi itself also sell high-end storage devices. Sun Microsystems uses Hitachi's Lightning line of storage products for its high-end StorEdge 9900 series, sold under the Sun brand.

With the product, two company sites less than 62 miles apart can mirror, or replicate, each other's data. This is designed to protect the information in case of a local disaster, with data from critical applications at one site mirrored to XP systems at the other. An XP system at a third site outside the region of the first two is also set up, in case the first two sites go down.
HP said so-called "synchronous" data replication is used between the two sites, allowing the second site to take over processing to virtually the exact point where it is interrupted in the event of a failure at the first.