News release

HP Enhances Business Value of Enterprise Virtual Array Family

New functionality and service portfolio expand business continuity and simplify management, raise the bar for storage virtualization

HP (NYSE:HPQ) today announced enhanced functionality and services for the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) family, providing simplified management, expanded business continuity, improved availability and greater flexibility for customers' complex, heterogeneous storage environments.

Including the HP StorageWorks EVA3000 and EVA5000, the EVA family builds a foundation for the HP Adaptive Enterprise strategy to tighten the linkage between business and IT through virtual technology designed to improve storage utilization, simplify array management and increase data availability for small- and medium-sized businesses and enterprise-class storage environments.

"Today's announcement reflects HP's commitment to delivering against its roadmap while empowering customers with controllable, resilient and extensible solutions to develop an adaptable, manageable storage utility," said Bob Schultz, senior vice president and general manager of Network Storage Solutions, HP. "Representing one of the company's fastest growing product lines, the HP StorageWorks EVA family maintains a solid industry leadership position by continuing to deliver against customer requirements."

Enhanced business continuity and storage management

HP expanded business continuance and improved management with HP StorageWorks Continuous Access EVA v1.1. This controller-based software performs real-time remote replication between HP StorageWorks EVAs to help protect customer assets and ensure business continuity in case of a local disaster. Enhanced Continuous Access EVA capabilities include:

• Support for EVA3000: Extends HP's replication capabilities further into the EVA product line with support for EVA3000 and interoperability between the EVA3000 and EVA5000 for easy-to-use replication between branch and remote locations.
  
  
• Asynchronous Replication: Unique to modular arrays, the HP software now provides robust asynchronous replication capabilities previously provided only on high-end arrays. This functionality enables long-distance replication and disaster recovery applications.
  
  
• Enhanced Scalability: Continuous Access EVA can now replicate twice the capacity between one or more remote sites enabling even larger scale storage consolidation.

In addition, HP introduced a new product for managing EVAs to extend the functionality of the EVA array management to include storage area network-wide monitoring and tight integration with the HP OpenView Storage Area Management suite. HP OpenView Storage Operations Manager offers a comprehensive and centralized array and SAN management solution. The product enables customers to organize, configure, visualize, monitor and provision storage among EVAs, tape, network-attached storage, direct-attached storage, infrastructure and heterogeneous storage devices - all from a single management console.

The single pane of glass view of a customer's EVA and heterogeneous SAN-based storage devices improves efficiency, reduces storage complexity and costs, and increases capacity utilization and performance. Additionally, to further help customers eliminate storage management complexity and administration costs, while accelerating standards-based technology adoption, the enhanced HP StorageWorks EVA family offers support of the Storage Networking Industry Association's Storage Management Interface Specification (SMI-S) version 1.01.

Improved availability and greater flexibility

The new HP StorageWorks EVA Service Portfolio provides customers with simple combinations of hardware and services that quickly deploy and maintain a solid EVA storage platform over time. These new offerings are designed to accelerate the customer's time to production and ensure ongoing availability of their data. New services include:

• Proactive Service Solution for EVA5000: A new suite of personalized services, including Instant Support Enterprise Edition automated event notification, annual high-availability technical evaluations, and proactive and change management processes - all designed to provide optimal availability and performance. Highly recommended for customers desiring extra measures for problem avoidance. (Expected availability in the first quarter of 2004 on EVA3000)
  
  
• Enhanced Proactive Service Solution for EVA5000: Geared for rapid production deployment and integration of the EVA into new or existing storage area networks, this service provides all the features in the Proactive Service Solution along with scaled HP SAN Solution Services. (Expected availability in the first quarter of 2004 on EVA3000)
  
  
• Foundation Service Solution: Base service included with every EVA3000 and EVA5000, providing deployment services and three years of 24-hours a day, 7-days a week four-hour response onsite hardware support and phone-in virtual controller software support and updates.

More information on the HP StorageWorks EVA Service Solution Portfolio is available at http://www.hp.com/hps/index_support.html.

New racking options

HP also announced new racking options that provide customers with greater flexibility in choosing the factory integrated solution best suited for their environment. The EVA3000 is now available in one of four integrated "independent bundle" configurations. Each bundle includes one pair of HSV100 controllers, two Fibre Channel drive enclosures and eight to 16 integrated Fibre Channel hard drives of varied size and speed depending on the bundle.

In addition, each bundle is factory customized to the customer's choice of EVA cabinet (22U, 36U, 42U) or rack system/E rack systems (25U, 33U, 41U). Configured solutions include support for the most popular multi-vendor operating systems and stringent data center availability enhancements such as multi-pathing and clustering.

The enhanced EVA offerings, expanded service portfolio and pre-configured factory bundles are available immediately through HP and its channel partners.

More information on all the HP StorageWorks EVA family products listed above is available at http://h18006.www1.hp.com/storage/deployment.html.

Launched in April, the HP StorageWorks EVA3000 brings enterprise-class functionality to the midrange market. In its first quarter shipping, the EVA3000 accounted for 46 percent of total second quarter EVA shipments and 15 percent of total second quarter revenue.

The EVA5000, HP's flagship "virtual" RAID solution, demonstrated a 58 percent revenue increase from the fourth quarter of 2002 to the first quarter of 2003 and 81 percent year-over-year growth. Enabled by VersaStor technology, both solutions meet application-specific demands for high transaction input/output and megabyte data rate performance, seamless capacity expansion, simplified storage management for improved storage utilization and scalability.

About HP

HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, personal computing and access devices, global services and imaging and printing for consumers, enterprises and small and medium businesses. For the last four quarters, HP revenue totaled $71.3 billion. More information about HP is available at http://www.hp.com.

This news release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include the possibility that the market for the sale of certain products and services may not develop as expected; that development and performance of these products and services may not proceed as planned; and other risks that are described from time to time in HP's Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the period ended July 31, 2003 and HP's other Securities and Exchange Commission reports filed after HP's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended October 31, 2002. If any of these risks or uncertainties materializes or any of these assumptions proves incorrect, HP's results could differ materially from HP's expectations in these statements. HP assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements.