HP StorageWorks 2006 Roundup

February 24, 2006: After two days of announcements and insight into HP’s storage vision, the sun sets over a small island off the coast of Kota Kinabalu and on StorageWorks 2006.

Getting past the explore, innovate and adapt motif running through the conference, the overriding theme was consolidation. HP sees a unified, end-to-end solution for storage and information lifecycle management (ILM) problems through consolidation of hardware, software and services.

“Customers aren’t looking to solve their problems on a box level.” says Bob Schultz. “They need an end-to-end solution. More Consolidation means more control.”

HP says that when it comes to storage, its customers are mostly concerned about IT consolidation, data centre management, compliance issues and disaster recovery. To address these concerns, it is using a combination of hardware, software and services to offer what it says is the most complete storage solution available.

To aid this drive on the hardware front, HP announced concurrent Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity in its EVA and XP disk arrays, EVA array support for 4Gb SAN environments, the 9.6Tb MLS2024 tape library and upgraded Enterprise File Services (EFS) WAN accelerators.

Software wise, HP has been improving its software range through the acquisition of companies such as SAN SRM specialist AppIQ and database archiving software developerOuterbay.

Alongside its hardware and software, HP is also pushing into ILM with a view that it be consolidated with storage management. Considering IDC told us all on day two of the conference that ILM is still not clearly understood by many organisations, this will mean a greater emphasis on HP’s services.

“It’s still very early days for ILM.” says Frank Harbist, vice president of HP Storage Software. “ILM is not a product, it’s about solutions. For HP, that means services.”

HP says that it has expanded its services to assist at virtually every stage of storage consolidation. From analysis, to decision making and deployment. The company says that its services help customers deal with storage consolidation issues, aiding them to set objectives, identify constraints and develop an overall strategy for managing and using information throughout their enterprise.

HP is a big player in the storage space with several best-in-breed appliances and software products. However in this market, a single end-to-end solution from any one vendor isn’t necessarily going to be the best at every part of the process, or the best solution for every organisation.

HP has an ambitious, all-encompassing vision for the future of data storage. Time will tell if it becomes the big Bomoh.

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