<Yawn!>
Sorry, maybe it's just a hangover from yet another contentless 100-slide vendor session, but this isn't really much new news! The "new" EVA Cluster is just the existing SVSP hardware, software, and a pair of EVAs, all bundled into one order code. Whilst the SVSP stuff is good, the new "Cluster" is hardly groundbreaking. TBH, I was hoping the EVA Cluster was going to be a bit more inventive.
De-dupe? Everyone's got de-dupe now. It does look mildly interesting, but I have yet to have any vendor actually come onsite and meet their brochure figures for either compression or savings in backup time. I hope hp have been conservative in their performance claims - they usually are - as sometimes it's embarassing when you have to explain to a boardmember that the brochure figures and vendor benchmarks he swallowed were "best case", i.e., "never going to happen in the real World"!
The new VC card is interesting, but mainly as it should allow us to use just one mezz slot for IP and/or SAN, which means we have more mezz slots free for other cards (important for clustering or webserving, where I want as many IP ports as I can get onto the card but still have redundant links for SAN). But the FCoE upgrade possibilities? FCoE is currently hamstrung by the fact that FCoE is a one-hop solution until they sort out the inter-switch protocol standards. So that means you can upgrade and go FCoE from the VC card/module to the top-of-the-rack switch (well, in this case to the blade chassis switch module), but then you have to split it out into seperate SAN and IP cabling again. So still virtually zero reason to actually have an FCoE capability in the first place, other than so hp can say "yeah, we can do what CISCO can, if customers ever want to".
/Off to the pub!