HP Doubles Down On Storage

One area both HP and its solution providers agree on is improving is the vendor's storage technology. HP has been making serious investments here, including the acquisition of midrange and enterprise NAS technology developer PolyServe early this year, said Ash Ashutosh, vice president and chief technologist for the HP StorageWorks division.

The company this year rolled out an entry-level virtual tape library line solution providers can take to smaller business customers, and by year-end expects to introduce new technology to do bare metal restore for rack-mounted servers, Ashutosh said.

Last month, HP introduced new versions of its EVA family, the models 4100, 6100 and 8100, which are architecturally the same as its previous 4000, 6000 and 8000 models, but which tout new high-availability and other advanced features and increased performance.

The arrays now come with a new cross-through internal switch that allows point-to-point connection between the controllers and the hard drives, giving the EVAs five nines (99.999 percent) uptime, said Patrick Eitenbichler, director of marketing for HP StorageWorks.

Nth Generation's Baldwin said that the five nines claim is a huge benefit. "HP has the historical data to claim five nines," he said. "A lot of vendors claim five nines, but they don't have the numbers to back it up. If HP says five nines, they'll do it."

Also new is virtual snapshots. Like traditional data snapshots, virtual snapshots produce a copy of the specified data that can be used in archiving and testing, said Eitenbichler. However, the capacity of such a snapshot is smaller than that of the original volume.

In addition, the company is helping cut power requirements with the new Ultrium 448 Tape Blade, a half-height tape storage that fits inside its BladeSystem c-Class enclosures. And it is improving the security of data by introducing new LTO-4 tape drives with native AES 256-bit encryption. The HP Secure Advantage portfolio, meanwhile, offers an identity-driven audit trail for policy monitoring and enforcement.

It all adds up to a resurgent HP that will bounce back from any problems it had, said Carl Wolfston, director of Headlands Associates, a Pleasanton, Calif.-based solution provider.

"They admitted they screwed up, so that's good," Wolfston said. "From a storage point of view, they're doing a pretty good job. They're hitting all the cylinders again. I'd have to give them a B+ or an A- now, compared to a B- or C+ last year, because they didn't seem to know what to do with PolyServe, and they showed an EVA road map of only one generation, compared to the five-year road map they're showing now."