HP Announces New Customer Wins for its Midrange Storage Line

PALO ALTO , Calif. , Mar. 27, 2006, HP today announced that Rydex Investments and Wheaton Franciscan Services have deployed HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Arrays (EVAs) in their IT environments.

The HP EVA disk array family delivers the industry’s lowest total cost of ownership in a virtualized array and meets a broad range of budget, capacity and performance requirements for customers. In a recent storage industry benchmark, the HP EVA8000 midrange disk array offered price/performance that was 64 percent better than a corresponding disk array from IBM. (1)

HP’s EVA family is enjoying solid success in the marketplace – revenue grew 28 percent year-over-year and the company shipped the 20,000th unit in the first fiscal quarter of 2006.

Rydex Investments is one of the fastest growing investment companies in the United States. It implemented an HP StorageWorks storage area network (SAN) solution using an HP EVA6000 to help accommodate the more than 50,000 trades the company makes every day.

“Rydex Investments specializes in serving financial professionals and investors who desire more flexibility than traditional fund companies offer,” said Wayne Cobb, chief technology officer, Rydex Investments. “To keep up with the rapid growth of our business and meet the steady demand for service and product enhancements, we implemented an HP storage solution that gives us the flexibility to respond to customer demands by allowing us to easily upgrade performance and capacity as needed.”

Wheaton Franciscan Services is a not-for-profit healthcare and housing organization with more than 100 health and shelter service organizations. It is realizing the increased capacity and performance benefits of its migration to an EVA8000.

“In order to support the continued growth of our healthcare organization, we looked to HP to help us simplify our increasingly complex IT environment with a reliable and cost-effective storage solution,” said Scott Harrison, SAN manager, Wheaton Franciscan Services. “Upgrading from an EVA5000 to an EVA8000 ensures that our storage infrastructure is able to accommodate growth while improving the manageability of storage assets in the organization.”

HP leads industry benchmark for price/performance

The HP StorageWorks EVA8000 earned the best price/performance ratio in its class and an “excellent” overall score as measured by the Storage Performance Council’s latest SPC-2 benchmark, which seeks to model real-world customer workloads.

The results beat IBM’s disk array by 64 percent and illustrate the highly competitive performance and capacity-class leading price-performance of the EVA8000 in relation to competitive midrange arrays included in the benchmark. (2)

More information about the Storage Performance Council’s SPC-2 benchmark is available at www.storageperformance.org.

More information about the HP StorageWorks portfolio is available at www.hp.com/go/storageworks.

About HP
HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company’s offerings span IT infrastructure, global services, business and home computing, and imaging and printing. For the four fiscal quarters ended Jan. 31, 2006, HP revenue totaled $87.9 billion. More information about HP (NYSE, Nasdaq: HPQ) is available at www.hp.com.

(1) The HP EVA StorageWorks 8000 demonstrated the best-in-class price performance figure of $346.42 per SPC-2 MBPS (megabytes per second); IBM’s price performance figure was $539.38 per SPC-2 MBPS for their TotalStorage DS8300 array.

(2) The SPC-2 benchmark results in this class are for storage subsystems larger than 1 terabyte.

This news release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions that, if they ever materialize or prove incorrect, could cause the results of HP and its consolidated subsidiaries to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including the expected development, performance or rankings of products or services; statements of expectation or belief; and any statement of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include the development, performance and market acceptance of products and services and other risks that are described from time to time in HP’s Securities and Exchange Commission reports , including but not limited to HP’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended Oct. 31, 2005 and other reports filed after such report. HP assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements.

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