HP EVA4400/6400/8400 now ship with XCS v10000000

Two months ago HP released a new firmware for the EVA family including 4400/6400/8400/P6300 and P6500, version XCS 10000000. As I blogged previously the EVA4400 could not compare with the midrange storage system from other vendors. It introduced few new features, which turned out not to be complete and some other features wasn't even included. Now except the re-branding of the EVA family to HP P6000 EVA, they also introduced a lot of new features with the new release. Some of the really useful features in this release:

• Thin provisioning - It's something the other vendors had for long time, it was about time to have such a feature on the EVA. This feature dynamically increases the space allocated to a virtual disk.
• Large LUN support - Because this feature was missing, last year I've spent one month for migrating data from several big disks to another diskgroup with LVM. This will support snapshot replication of LUNs greater than 2 TB, expanding and shrinking of the large LUNs is also supported.
• Online virtual disk migration (change Vraid or disk group) - Another 'must have' feature, change a virtual disk's redundancy level or disk group membership without impacting host I/O. Previously one has to create another virtual disk in required level and move data from the other.

There are also a lot of fixes included in this release and some of them sounds really scary. For more information refer to the release notes.