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Hewlett-Packard has quietly made its newly acquired 3PAR storage technology one of its four primary storage business pillars going forward, and is in the process of rolling that technology out to its solution providers.
HP last month unveiled the moves to many of its solution providers in a meeting that brought them together with the vendor's entire enterprise sales team to prepare both sides for the coming changes.
Solution providers told CRN that the technology from 3PAR, which HP acquired in September, will be a major focus of HP going forward.
It joins three other product lines being pushed to the forefront by HP, two of which, like 3PAR, were recent acquisitions.
Those two product lines are the P4000 series of virtual storage appliances, which are based on technology HP received when it acquired LeftHand Networks in late 2008, and the X9000 family of scalable NAS appliances stemming from HP's 2009 acquisition of software developer IBRIX.
The fourth pillar of HP's storage focus going forward, the StoreOnce deduplication software it introduced earlier this year, is the only one of the four which the company developed organically.
Conspicuously absent from that list is HP's EVA line of midrange storage appliances, and its XP family of enterprise-class storage arrays which HP OEMs from Hitachi.
Frank Rauch, vice president of channels for HP's Enterprise Servers, Storage, and Networking (ESSN) business, confirmed the four primary focuses of HP's storage going forward, but said HP will also continue to work with its large base of XP and EVA customers.
Chris Moore, StorageWorks Division manager for U.S. ESSN channels, disagreed that the new products means a de-emphasis of the EVA and XP storage lines.
The XP storage array family remains at the top of HP's storage product lineup for enterprise customers, and especially for mainframes, where HP's new 3PAR technology does not connect, Moore said.
The EVA, in the meantime, has a large installed base of customers, many of which run their business on it, and HP will support those customers, Moore said. "We have a roadmap out at least for the next couple years... We are already planning the launch of the next generation of EVA," he said.
Next: Prepping The Channel For 3PAR
