HP will be rebranding their EVA range storage appliances to the P6000 series range within their Converged Infrastructure capability.
Converged Infrastructure is a set of integrated stacks of server, storage and networking with a common management layer.
Converged Infrastructure will have a common set of storage arrays consisting of a standard 3U mount unit holding the drives, basic controller pair and network ports.
Examples of this are the P4000 (LeftHand) iSCSI block storage arrays and X9000 (Ibrix) scale-out file storage arrays.
The block-focused mid-range EVA arrays will also have their XCS controller software ported to Converged Infrastructure's storage processor blades.
In line with HP's developing unified storage branding the EVA will become the P6000, joining the P2000 (ex-MSA), P4000 and X9000 in HP's storage brand line-up.
It is understood that thin provisioning, replication, snapshots, and deduplication are functions layered on top of the storage personalities.
It is possible that deduplication and disk-2-disk backup will be a fourth storage personality inside the storage element of Converged Infrastructure.
HP's Storage Essentials will not be a direct part of the storage aspect of Converged Infrastructure. As far as the EVA is concerned Storage Essentials currently talks to Command View to get EVA information. In Converged Infrastructure it will get information from the low-level storage hardware, and from the storage management SW executing in the storage processor blades.
Converged Infrastructure is becoming one of the most, if not the most, integrated IT stacks in the industry. This is a shrewd move HP to ensure that migration to a converged infrastructure is available for existing EVA customers.