HP's StorageWorks Grid garners mixed reaction

HOUSTON - HP's road map for a dynamically reconfigurable storage grid is drawing praise, although customers and industry observers also are questioning the pace at which the company plans to roll it out.

Company executives outlined that blueprint last week before an audience of about 1,000 at the HP Americas StorageWorks 2004 Conference in Houston. HP is relying on grid technology to help reverse declining storage revenue.

"Some of you may be wondering whether we are really interested in storage," said Chairwoman and CEO Carly Fiorina. "Let's face it, our execution in this business has not been all that we would have liked recently, so I am here today to say our determination to lead in storage is unwavering."

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HOUSTON - HP's road map for a dynamically reconfigurable storage grid is drawing praise, although customers and industry observers also are questioning the pace at which the company plans to roll it out.

Company executives outlined that blueprint last week before an audience of about 1,000 at the HP Americas StorageWorks 2004 Conference in Houston. HP is relying on grid technology to help reverse declining storage revenue.

"Some of you may be wondering whether we are really interested in storage," said Chairwoman and CEO Carly Fiorina. "Let's face it, our execution in this business has not been all that we would have liked recently, so I am here today to say our determination to lead in storage is unwavering."

Last month HP reported an operating loss of $208 million on revenue of $3.4 billion. Storage revenue declined 15% year over year.

Fiorina described the StorageWorks Grid as being a variety of "smart cells" - specialized servers with CPU, I/O and storage - that can be dynamically provisioned for new storage services as business needs change, data grows or more performance needs to be exacted from the network. These smart cells will interconnect with each other in a grid-like fashion using Fibre Channel, iSCSI and Gigabit Ethernet, and attach to existing storage arrays and hardware that are grid-enabled with firmware upgrades or APIs.

As needs change, smart cells can be added to the grid, where they will perform data migration, replication and file-serving functions.

HP's timeline for introducing smart cells spans four years, which worries some analysts and users.

"In general, the idea of the grids is interesting and the natural evolution of what HP and others have done. However, I'm concerned that it is too long on hype right now," says Greg Schultz, a senior analyst with Evaluator Group.

HP counters by noting that several of its products already employ the grid architecture. Smart cells are contained in its recently introduced Reference Information Storage System (RISS) and its Scalable File Share (SFS), and its StorageWorks XP12000 high-end storage array.

"The grid plan is big and encompassing, and it is very important for HP to show that it is more than cloudware, so the natural fit is for SFS and RISS to be linked to it today," Schultz says.

Users, while enthusiastic about the storage grid, also are concerned about HP's time frame.

"Grid storage all sounds very good, but let's see what actually happens," says Norm Hendricks, network operations manager at Wentworth-Douglas Hospital in Dover, N.H. "Four years in the future is a long time, and it wouldn't be the first thing that got sidetracked a little bit."

But David Bratt, technology architect for the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute in Tampa, Fla., says that despite the timing, HP's plan is smart in that it doesn't require him to throw out existing storage.

"Given that this architecture allows existing mixed storage arrays and connectivity options, including investment protection and centralized management, this seems like a great fit and an innovative direction for HP in the storage arena," Bratt says.