By Cat Yong
HP’s approach of having one single architecture for enterprise storage of all shapes and sizes or that is ‘polymorphic’, is getting rave reviews. Among other things, it aims to negate the need for and cost of having too many storage management consoles.
Janice Chang, product manager of HP’s Storage Division further explained, “Legacy storage vendors are simply not equipped to help organisations respond to new workloads and bolting on new features to old architectures has created a nightmare. HP’s unique set of converged storage innovations help clients simplify infrastructure and reduce costs with a common architecture across storage segments and categories.”
 |
| (L-R) Janice Chang and Justin Yeap |
Three new product portfolios underline what HP themselves are calling their biggest announcement for 2013 for their converged storage division.These 3 are HP 3PAR StoreServ 7000 Storage, HP StoreAll Storage and HP StoreOnce 2000 and 4000 Backup.
Of note is HP 3PAR StoreServ which brings enterprise-level or Tier 1 storage availabilty and features to the mid-tier range with technologies like Persistent Cache, Persistent Ports and Peer Persistence. HP 3PAR sees a 60% increase in customers since 3PAR’s acquisition by HP in 2010, and increase by as many 1200 customers for FY2012. 3 of the top 4 global managed hosting vendors also use HP 3PAR solutions.
Overall, it has started to come down to the software to fine tune storage capabilities and milk as much as possible out of storage hardware.
Market potential
Interestingly, HP’s disk-based technology; HP 3PAR; and HP StoreOnce backup solutions, could be gaining more interest than HP StoreAll which is a highly scalable platform tailored for unstructured Big Data storage, according to Justin Yeap, solutions architect for HP Malaysia’s Storage Division.
The potential cost-savings of HP’s converged storage solutions are seeing significant interest from existing customers to upgrade their solutions, as well as from new customers looking to jump onboard the HP bandwagon.
Yeap also cited ongoing deployments in the telco, government and manufacturing verticals, for the year ahead. “The banks are still in planning stage, however,” he said.
