HP Midrange Storage Impresses

Hewlett-Packard Co.'s (NYSE: HPQ) storage business today is like an offensive line on a winning football team: Regardless of how well it performs, everybodys talking about other team members the next day.

The storage performance was all but lost in accounts of how HP stormed back to have its best quarter since the Compaq merger in May 2002. Every business unit was profitable, and Imaging and Printing earned more than $1 billion. So hardly anybody noticed that midrange storage array sales more than doubled.

HP CEO Carly Fiorina did cite “a strong performance in the fastest growing segment of the storage market” in her earnings review. That segment is the midrange market, where HP increased revenue by 109 percent year-over-year to go with a 14 percent jump in the high-end.

The Enterprise Systems division, of which storage is a part, showed a $106 million profit in the quarter.

The revenue jump shows HP’s storage segment has made a smooth transition from the Compaq merger. HP slotted its new EVA3000 product line under the EVA5000 inherited from Compaq and tried to keep customers of both happy.