The guiding principles behind HP's storage strategy

HP revamps its storage story

Developments of the week in storage

This is the second in a two-part report on HP's StorageWorks Conference, which was held last week in Las Vegas. Last time, we looked at the products HP announced at the show. Today, we take a look at HP's storage strategy behind the announcements.

First, let's put some context around HP's storage business. In its second fiscal quarter ended April 30, HP's revenue from networked storage was down 6% over last year - clearly not a good thing. But let's keep some perspective here: the networked storage business is a part of HP's Enterprise Storage and Servers Group, which at $4.2 billion saw its numbers and profitability increase 6% over the same quarter a year ago. And lest anyone be tempted to take up a collection on HP's behalf, it might be worth knowing that the company as a whole estimates its third quarter revenue will come in at just over $20.3 billion.

Also, keep in mind that when we are dealing with HP (and with competitors EMC and IBM), we are talking about a company that likely spends more on R&D than the annual revenue of most of its competitors (Dell, EMC, HDS and IBM excepted).

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This is the second in a two-part report on HP's StorageWorks Conference, which was held last week in Las Vegas. Last time, we looked at the products HP announced at the show. Today, we take a look at HP's storage strategy behind the announcements.

First, let's put some context around HP's storage business. In its second fiscal quarter ended April 30, HP's revenue from networked storage was down 6% over last year - clearly not a good thing. But let's keep some perspective here: the networked storage business is a part of HP's Enterprise Storage and Servers Group, which at $4.2 billion saw its numbers and profitability increase 6% over the same quarter a year ago. And lest anyone be tempted to take up a collection on HP's behalf, it might be worth knowing that the company as a whole estimates its third quarter revenue will come in at just over $20.3 billion.

Also, keep in mind that when we are dealing with HP (and with competitors EMC and IBM), we are talking about a company that likely spends more on R&D than the annual revenue of most of its competitors (Dell, EMC, HDS and IBM excepted).

So much for the background. How will HP move forward? The company plans to grow its storage business by focusing on three broad technology areas: information lifecycle management (ILM), storage grids (see the links below for our series of newsletter on storage grids), and data protection products and services.

There are two guiding principles that HP hopes will help it achieve its goals. First, HP will continue to develop integrated, standards-based management products that will eventually provide interoperability between servers, storage and networks.  Second, it will look outside the company as well as within to make sure it can provide products in a timely manner.

The logic is both straightforward and internally consistent. ILM potentially touches just about every aspect of data storage, and when it sits atop grid-based storage ILM can be expected to help large organizations get maximum value from their storage devices.

Further, a key issue with both ILM and grids concerns the frequent planned movement of data to more cost-appropriate devices, and the constant provisioning and reprovisioning of storage assets so that their value can be spread among a wide variety of users and processes. Because of that, both ILM and grid must rely heavily on an automated infrastructure to provide these services in a cost-effective manner. A consequence of this necessary commitment to automation is the requirement to interoperate across a wide variety of devices and software, and the only way to ensure that is by using standards-based management techniques. HP is able to do much of this now because it often turns to partners to get technology initiatives out the door in a timely fashion.

By partnering, HP is at the forefront of technology leadership when it comes to standards-based storage management. I expect HP to make good progress integrating its storage management offerings with its OpenView enterprise management software, as both are also increasingly standards-based. 

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.