Today HP will announce two new storage arrays. Although taken from different product families, the hardware will be branded in a consistent manner, demonstrating HPs desire to bring together a range of storage technologies they’ve purchased over the last few years. P2000 G3 MSA (Modular Smart Array) System P2000 Large Form Factor I’ve not been a particular fan of the MSA devices, as I’ve worked mainly in large organisations where scalability isn’t delivered by point solutions. However for SMEs, the new P2000 MSA seems to offer a lot of features for a small price point. The new device provides 8Gb Fibre Channel, 1Gb iSCSI, up to 64 snapshots plus the option to replicate to another similar P2000 array. Both 2.5″ and 3.5″ drives are supported, by Small Form Factor and Large Form Factor models respectively. Arrays can scale up to 57.6TB with SAS drives and 192TB with SATA. Surely I could replace my existing storage arrays with this kind of scalability I hear you say! Well yes and no; low cost may appear to mean high value, however it depends on whether this kind of array provides features you care about, for example, component redundancy, RAID, automated drive sparing, multi-pathing and so on. If these options aren’t high on your list, then the P2000 could be for you