* HP rolls out storage services and devices
Last week at its annual StorageWorks Conference in Las Vegas, HP made what it termed “the biggest storage announcement in HP history.” I was at the meetings, and here’s a review of some of the announcements I saw:
The company announced seven products, including:
* Three disk arrays – all major enhancements to existing EVA products (the 4000, 6000 and 8000 lines). While they show a logical continued development of the lines, they can also be seen as good indicators that the company is committed to this line for the long haul. New virtualization technology in the new crop of EVAs will enable managers to scale this mid-range storage easily, and the new Snapclone and Snapshot software both allow immediate use of the cloned data and improve utilization efficiency.
* The E-series modular tape library, which the company looks to pair with the EVA arrays.
* A virtual tape library (Virtual Library System 6000) with high I/O numbers (one longtime HP customer wondered if his shop could actually use all the throughput the thing can provide).
*A “Fast Recovery Solution” for improving recovery times for Microsoft Exchange databases.
The three most interesting announcements by far were for a “WAN accelerator”, a high-end network-attached storage device (HP’s first NAS entry), and the announcement of a set of “new” service offerings for information lifecycle management (ILM):
* The WAN accelerator promises performance improvements of up to 100-times for branch offices that must access e-mail, files and office applications over the WAN.
Wide area file services (WAFS) is a technology area that has really heated up in the last year, as branch and remote offices look for ways to make their LAN-based technologies work efficiently on WANs. (Think of the inherently “chatty” protocols that all Microsoft Office modules impose on the user – fine for LANs but deadly in the way they inhibit performance over long-haul connections. A WAN accelerator greatly reduces the amount of hand shaking that must occur between the local and remote sites, with the result that more data is transferred.)
* The Enterprise File Services (EFS) NAS gateway product is aimed squarely at the high-end NAS market where EMC’s Celerra and Network Appliance’s 900-series play, and looks to come in at about half of what those companies charge for comparable offerings. The device is HP’s first venture into the NAS world, and means that HP’s channel partners, which until now had been leaving money on the table when it came to file servers, at last have a very competitive offering.
* The ILM services are certainly interesting, although referring to them as “new” may be a bit deceptive. In fact, HP has had a thriving ILM consulting practice for quite some time now, and has achieved significant success with it.
Apparently, HP has only recently seen fit to tie a marketing wrapper around the whole thing and give the ILM services program a formal name. Look for the company to provide both internal and partnered services such as business requirements analyses, blueprints for ILM architectures, help with defining ILM policies, data migration, data and information discovery, and help in several other areas. These are potentially very high-value services – I plan on looking at this offering very closely and will report on it as soon as circumstances permit.
The conference was a good one from the point of view of the HP customers and resellers that I spoke with. It is of course no surprise when the sponsoring company is upbeat, but resellers and customers tend to be as blunt about things as they feel a situation warrants, and having spoken to several of them during the past week it seems quite clear that HP’s storage channel partners – at least the ones I spoke with – remain enthused.
Next time, we look at where HP’s storage strategy is taking the company.
*** If you will be attending the Storage World Conference in Long Beach Calif., June 7-9, please stop by and say hi. I’ll be running two sessions at the conference, a panel on SMB Storage on June 8 (starring senior execs from EMC, FalconStor, HP, IBM and several other leading vendors) and a round table discussion on June 9 on the topic of “How to create the best disaster recovery plan” (featuring top IT executives who will share real-world experiences). Alternatively, you can stop by and try to skewer me at one of the “analyst face-to-face” meetings. Feel free to take your best shot.
Check out the conference agenda at https://www.storageworldconference.com/agenda/
