HP Storage update from Barcelona

[#1]

 By Calvin Zito, aka @HPStorageGuy

At the moment, I’m somewhere over Greenland, on my way home from our press and blogger event in Barcelona.  It was a delightful time both professionally and personally, though I’m looking forward to being home and sleeping more than just a few hours each night.  Maybe it’s the air at 37,000 but I find myself reflecting on the past year and the future of HP Storage and the storage press conference on Wednesday provides the perfect opportunity for me to do that. 

Looking back

It’s been about a year since the industry’s first storage Tech Day (blogger event); I pulled together the agenda that we shared with the bloggers.  We talked about how storage would help deliver on our Converged Infrastructure strategy, focusing on three areas:

1. Scale-out storage NAS
2. Deduplication
3. Scale-out SAN 

Since last October, we’ve done a number of things to improve our hand in those three areas:

1. Last November, we began shipping our X9000 scale-out NAS solution based on IBRIX,  The X9000 has a massive 16PB single namespace, can non-disruptively scale performance and capacity independently, and has unified management for high-performance file workloads and bulk storage
2. At HP Tech Forum in June, we announced HP StoreOnce.  This is technology developed by HP Labs, and really is the only architecture for client, in-line and array-based storage data deduplication.  It’s 20% faster than competitive solutions and at normal deduplication rates can save 95% on storage capacity costs.
3. The P4000 family (formerly HP LeftHand) has had several announcements over the year.  It’s a scale-out SAN solution that can non-disruptively scale performance and capacity independently.  It has both physical and virtual SAN deployments, and comes complete (meaning you don’t pay extra) with features like replication, thin provisioning, remote replication, and management.  Last quarter, the P4000 had triple digit growth.

I had reason to be excited about the future.  While there are some things that aren’t moving fast enough for me and there is still more to come, I knew we had a pretty good hand we were playing from.

And along comes 3PAR

The big news in storage over the last few weeks has been the HP acquisition of 3PAR.  At the Barcelona event, Dave Donatelli talked about HP’s market position – we are number one or two in every market, including the overall leader in storage.  But there’s one “number 3” on the list and that’s external storage.  Number 3 isn’t good enough. 

According to Dave, 3PAR is a storage product for the next 10 years, a next-generation software architecture.  The question that everyone has is where will 3PAR fit.  Dave showed a chart that best describes it. 

Our competitor’s have a product for the mid-range, another for the high-end, and another for service providers.  Instead of having three different products for three different market segments, we have one product that can scale across all three.  That will make life easier for customers because they can buy fewer products to across these different workloads.

Dave summarized things by saying that we currently have 11% market share in external storage; with the addition of 3PAR, HP storage just got a whole lot more interesting to the other 89% of the market. 

Looking forward

Dave announced that we have a new leader in HP Storage, the former CEO of 3PAR David Scott.  I worked for David back in 1999 when he started the XP disk array business at HP.  I had a chance to talk to him in Barcelona catching him up on things inside HP and told him “welcome home”.  David was a very strong leader at HP and obviously did great things at 3PAR.  I think David is a great choice to lead HP StorageWorks going forward.

Over the next several days, I’ll provide an introduction to 3PAR. I have some video from the Barcelona event that I'll hopefully get edited and available to watch soon.

Editor's note: I was over Greenland when I wrote this but didn't have internet access on my flight so didn't post it until I was back home.

[#2]

That looks like a great roadmap, and I'm excited to see more specific details on the 3PAR integration and futures. Clearly HP is betting the farm on 3PAR, so it will be interesting to see how the hardware and software platforms are moulded to scale from P4000 size all the way up to large service providers. A 3PAR virtual appliance would be an interesting product as well, for small/medium businesses.

I hope HP throws a ton of R&D into the platform so they can surpass EMC, NetApp and IBM with innovation, ease of use, performance, and great features. HP's recent significant R&D cuts had me worried the 3PAR platform might languish as just another acquisition. But I'm optimistic that's not the case given HP wants to use 3PAR technology top to bottom.

[#3]

Hi Calvin,

Thanks for sharing this with us!

Looking forward for the video's from Barcelona.

Regards,

Eric

[#4]

@Brad - I wouldn't exactly call it betting the farm but obviously we felt 3PAR would be pretty important as a platform for the future.  All of the current platforms (P2000, P4000, EVA, P9500/XP) will continue.  There's a huge installed base of EVA customers out there and they can expect to see a platform refresh or two going into the future.  I also think the P2000 and P4000 will continue on long into the future - 3PAR doesn't go that far down that I'm aware of.  FInally, there is also a faithful installed base of XP customers and places where the XP plays (like HP Non-Stop and Mainframe attach) where 3PAR doesn't go.  There are also some other surprises coming from HP in the near future.  But it all adds up to a great portfolio that I couldn't be more excited about!

At the press conference, Dave Donatelli said that we would increase R&D spending on 3PAR so the commitment is there.

@Eric - Thanks for re-tweeting the link to this.  I have another post related to this and the InfoSmack podcast swirling around my head and hopefully will have it up soon.

[#5]

I really think HP should put the EVA out of its misery and stop devoting more R&D time to it. When it was introduced, what 8 years ago?, it was certainly leading the pack in ease of use and flexibility. But compare the low-end 3PAR to the EVA and there's just no remote contest. The P4000 should stick around as it's a great SMB iSCSI array. I'm not saying drop support for EVA customers, but don't expend any more R&D on major hardware refreshes. Maintenance releases to fix bugs and support new operating systems is fine, as you don't want to leave customers in the cold. But budgets are finite and putting more R&D into 3PAR is a wiser use of money, IMHO.

If HP's position is the XP is only for mainframes or customers with deep pockets or existing XP shops, P4000 is for SMB iSCSI users, and 3PAR does everthing else in the middle, I think that's a winning product line. Enhance 3PAR to be multi-protocol such as NFS/NAS, then it will strongly compete with NetApp. Snaz up the management GUI so it's like the new IBM array, add hot-plug I/O cards like EMC, support FCoE, 8Gb FC, 10Gb iSCSI, and it would be one very competitive product. HP has also hinted at array based de-dupe, which again, would be a great addition as NetApp ships that today.

[#6]

Hi Rom,

There are over a 100,000 reasons I disagree with your comment about the EVA.  There's a huge installed base of customers and frankly, the EVA is still an incredibly easy array to use.  It continues to be a strong contender in the mid-range array space - on top of that, the next EVA that's coming has had probably > 90% of the R&D poured into it, so there's no doubt that the next generation EVA is around the corner and makes sense not only for HP but for EVA customers.

I think your assessment of our long term direction is pretty close though I'm sure as we finalize our plans, the details will be shared.  In the near term, we have a large installed base EVA and XP/P9500 and those will continue.  Nothing in our portfolio competes with the P4000 and it will continue long into the future.  Finally, as our integration of 3PAR proceeds, it will be a very strategic platform for HP storage in the mid-range to enterprise space as well as for service providers and private cloud.

Thanks!  Calvin

[#7]

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