HP announced that California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB) has made a purchase of HP P6000 Enterprise Virtual Arrayspower its datacenter, which empowers over 5,000 students and faculty. As a part of the transaction Hewlett-Packard sold its 100,00th EVA unit, a milestone the hardware giant achieved in a little over 10 years.

CSUMB used an older version of EVA servers prior to the upgrade, and has achieved a number of improvements thanks to it based on some of the figures HP published. The data center’s carbon footprint has been lowered by 40 percent, and the capacity per rack has been doubled. The P6000 deployment also provides a better means of cloud-powered disaster recovery, and according an Edison Group study Hewlett-Packard cited in a release, managing the new infrastructure is now somewhere between 20 to 30 percent easier.

“CSUMB professors and staff need information access around the clock,” said Steve Mann, associate director, Network Services, California State University, Monterey Bay. “The scalability of the HP P6000 EVA will enable us to cost-effectively support the capacity demands generated by our current and future graduating classes.”

Thanks to the acquisition of 3PAR and other aggressive initiatives, Hewlett-Packard has established itself in a cozy spot within the enterprise storage market and is seeing a fair amount of growth.  This is despite a high-profile lawsuit again Oracle over Intel’s Itanium chip line, which the software no longer supports but is still powering a big portion of HP servers out there. The latest jab at Larry Ellison took place a couple weeks ago.

Education is an important sector for high end storage solutions, as HP seeks more clients across the board.  Another major storage vendor that won a big contract in the past couple of months is EMC. As a part of a contract with British Isle of Man Government, the administration’s data will soon be hosted on EMC storage arrays.