HP Storage Blitz Leverages 3PAR Acquisition

HP is building on the storage-related portion of January's CloudSystem announcement with the integration of 3PAR Utility Storage across the company's Converged Infrastructure portfolio. With features like automated storage tiering and thin storage offerings to eliminate over-provisioning, the integration will enable clients to optimize cloud delivery and help it consolidate its storage hardware and respond to continuing data growth, according to HP. The company also says that it has simplified data management and provided a lower total cost of ownership.

According to HP, 3PAR Utility Storage meets the demand for a new storage architecture designed for cloud service delivery, and the integration with Converged Infrastructure will take customers to new levels of agility and efficiency. Combined, the two can reduce cloud application deployment time from days to minutes, improve operational efficiency of storage management tenfold and cut storage costs by up to 50 percent.

In addition to the integration announcement, HP made three product announcements. The P4800 G2 SAN (starting at $148,000), which is built inside an HP BladeSystem c7000 enclosure, reduces networking costs by up to 65 percent. The HP D2D4324 Backup System ($149,999) can back up as much as 1.4 petabytes of data with 96 terabytes of raw disk capacity, reducing the cost of storage for disk-based backup by 95 percent. Available in three configurations (500, 1,000 and 3,000 mailboxes, starting at $35,900), the HP E5000 Messaging System for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 can speed deployment by 75 percent and support users with larger mailboxes at a lower cost per user.

David Vellante, senior analyst, Wikibon.org, thinks that the most important aspect of the announcement is HP trying to show that it is making progress on its $2.4 billion acquisition of 3PAR, in which it paid more than double the offer that was initially accepted from Dell. "It needs to move quickly to show ROI on the 3PAR acquisition. Personally, I think 3PAR's sales through HP's channel will absolutely explode and approach $1 billion within 24 months. Will it justify the $2.4 billion price tag? I would say yes, if HP can achieve this type of growth."

From an integration perspective, he considers the move "pretty lightweight," but it's "table stakes in HP land to provide this capability for new assets like 3PAR." Overall, Vellante says, HP storage has been a second-class citizen behind servers, and had become a mishmash of internally developed products that were under-funded along with products procured from OEMs."HP management began to realize that it was falling behind technically in storage, and the LeftHand acquisition was the first indication that HP wanted to change that. The Dave Donatelli hire was the next indicator, and then of course IBRIX and the 3PAR blockbuster acquisition has now made storage a super-high priority at HP. Combine that with an injection of new HP management that knows the storage business very well [for example, Randy Seidl, Chris Riley, Tom Joyce, John Clavin and many others], and you have the potential to totally transform a business."

On the product side, Vellante thinks the StoreOnce capability on the D2D4324 Backup System is significant because it can challenge EMC's total dominance in this space. Architecturally, it's technology that can be placed throughout the infrastructure portfolio, and it's 100 percent homegrown in HP Labs. For the HP 4800 G2 SAN he likes the fact that it addresses a growth market and helps the company gain share from its server installed base.

"HP's so-called 'attach rate' is way lower than it should be. In the good old days, server companies like IBM, HP, Digital, etc. had huge attach rates [that is, the percentage of storage market share within its server installed base]--like 80 percent-plus. I don't know what HP's attach rates are for storage, but I promise you there is enormous upside potential within the HP installed base for HP to increase its storage market share." As for the Microsoft appliance, Vellante says the market is clearly moving to appliance-based solutions in certain software segments, such as data warehousing, and Microsoft apps is a great place to "appliance-ize." It also fills a void created when HP got popped out of the Oracle Exadata appliance deal after Oracle bought Sun.

While Mark Peters, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, thinks all of HP's announcements could be viewed as 'big" in their own right, he believes the most significant announcement is a tie between the SAN/blade and the messaging system "as they both demonstrate new/different/better approaches and show progress in terms of HP's Converged Infrastructure."

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