Following the recent HP event in Barcelona I thought we should share some relevent information.
It’s been about a year since the industry’s first storage Tech Day. HP talked about how storage would help deliver on their Converged Infrastructure strategy, focusing on three areas:
- Scale-out storage NAS
- Deduplication
- Scale-out SAN
Since last October, HP have done a number of things to improve their hand in those three areas:
- Last November, they began shipping their 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
- At HP Tech Forum in June, HP 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.
- 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.
Along comes 3PAR
The big news in storage over the last few weeks has been the HP acquisition of 3PAR. HP have recently spoken about their market position – they 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 HP, 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. HP showed a chart that best describes it.
HPs 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, HP have one product that can scale across all three. That will make life easier for customers because they can buy fewer products across these different workloads.
HP summarised things by saying that they 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.
Interesting times!