HP Bets Big On StorageWorks

But now HP has a bevy of new products shipping this quarter, with others in the pipeline, that promise to give it a formidable storage and server offering. Indeed, HP, as well as analysts and solution providers, see much of the company's woes coming from management and go-to-market blunders rather than a gap in its enterprise-product portfolio.

"They stumbled; there's no question they've lost a lot of momentum," says Tony Asaro, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "I don't think it is a technology issue as much as an execution issue."

Looking to move beyond its disastrous third-quarter execution shortfall, the company used its annual HP World in Chicago to focus on its server and storage pipeline. If there's a common theme, it's virtualization.

HP's new Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) 3000 provides a lower-cost storage-virtualization subsystem that should give solution providers a better answer to the midrange offerings of Dell, EMC and IBM. And significant enhancements to the HP Virtual Server Environment (VSE) should give partners a viable answer to IBM's new pSeries servers based on its P5 processor.

Of course, virtualization is nothing new to the server and storage world. But the challenge some solution providers face is many clients' emphasis on low cost. That's why HP is betting big that its StorageWorks EVA system will become more appealing now that it offers a lower-cost alternative to its costly Fibre Channel drives. The new EVA 3000 supports a new drive technology it has co-developed with Seagate called Fibre Attached Technology Adapted (FATA).

The EVA 3000 is intended to let customers segment data that doesn't require real-time access, such as e-mail with mission-critical data on a common system, allowing for the referential data to be stored on the lower-cost FATA drives. According to HP, FATA drives cost half that of traditional Fibre Channel drives.

In a move designed to further incent solution providers to push the StorageWorks line, HP released the EVA 3000 Starter Kit, which includes a 2-Gbps Fibre Channel SAN array with 1 TB of capacity that can scale to 16 TB, two controllers in a single disk enclosure and HP OpenView Storage Operations Manager.

"It has a simple way of bundling all the things you need to build a SAN," says Michael Feinberg, CTO of HP's network storage business.

The starter kit, priced at $42,000, and the new FATA drives will give solution providers an answer to EMC's lower-cost arrays, says Aaron Ferraro, presales system engineer at CDW. "Now we're going to be able to compete against EMC's lower-end arrays on price," he says.

HP is hoping its expanded virtualization across server lines also will resonate with partners. A new version of its Unix platform--dubbed HP UX-11i v2--will run on HP 9000, Alpha and Integrity servers. It is the first common release that runs on all three platforms. HP is also adding a multi-OS version VSE--a suite of components that provides service-level objectives around three categories: resource utilization, dynamic performance allocation and application prioritization.