It means that after November 1st, you can not order a new A3312A from
HP.  They will continue to maintain and support them for five years or
longer (typically longer).

I'm not sure about the modules,  they also be discontiued when the
chassis has been discontinued... which means that if you have open slots
in your A3312A's, you may want to load it up now while you can.

The HVD10, holds 10 drives,  you can split it into two scsi busses (for
mirroring) of five drives each.  The A3312A held 8 drives and could be
split into mirrors of four drives each.  The HVD10 also supports FAST
disk drives, i.e. 10,000 RPM.

The downside is that the chassis is more expensive. Roughly twice the
cost, however you can easily put 360GB of disk space in that box.  And
more as newer larger capacity drive modules become available.  There is
a price break even point, though, that single HVD10 with 180G is
approximately the same cost as two A3312A's with 144GB of disk space.

Jim Phillips wrote:
>
> I read where:
>
> "High Availability Storage System (HASS) (A3312A/AZ) Rack Units will be
> Discontinuance on November 1, 2000. This will be the 6-month notice. The
> customers are recommend to go to the HP SureStore HVD10 product (A5616A/AZ).
> Please see the ESP and CNO announcement on the HVD10."
>
> Just what does this mean?
>
> Jim Phillips                            Manager of Information Systems
> E-Mail: [log in to unmask]     Therm-O-Link, Inc.
> Phone: (330) 527-2124                   P. O. Box 285
>   Fax: (330) 527-2123                   10513 Freedom Street
>   Web: http://www.tolwire.com  Garrettsville, Ohio  44231