Post-merger the new HP says it is now deploying nine TB a month of storage
globally. Its enterprise arrays alone have over a petabyte of installed capacity
so far.
Speaking at its enterprise network storage architecture (ENSA) Asia-Pacific
conference in Singapore, Neal Clapper, VP of Online Storage at HP´s Network
Storage Solutions says that storage was no longer a peripheral. "It´s
moved to central status, while servers are often becoming peripheral!" she
adds.
HP was a low-profile player in this area in the 1990s, largely through its
tape backup products and disk arrays that have shipped with HP servers for well
over a decade. More recently, it ramped up its enterprise arrays and
virtualization products.
Post 1990s, a big step was the re-orienting of its popular OpenView network
management software toward storage management. OpenView´s storage area manager
(SAM) now includes capabilities of discovery, assignment and access control,
performance and capacity analysis, service levels and metering/charge-back,
replication (for remote mirroring), data protection and media management.
HP´s enterprise storage solutions tended to focus on the higher-capacity
data-center needs. Now, the merger with Compaq brings in a wide range of storage
solutions, giving it an end-to-end range.
"It´s all about storage management," says Clapper. "The
secret ingredient in storage is storage management. We´re building storage
intelligence into our devices, into the fabric," she added.
As far as trends in storage management is concerned, they do vary by
geography. In India, for instance, direct-attached storage still dominates over
85 percent of large enterprises, according to surveys by Dataquest in India.
Storage area networks and consolidation have made very slow inroads, thanks to
infrastructure issues, primarily the lack of cheap, high-availability bandwidth
across the country, as well as the funds squeeze in India over the past year
when SAN really grew worldwide. This should change in late 2003, as the new,
private intercity fiber networks light up, offering cheaper bandwidth, and
enterprises deploy data and voice applications across them in India.
And the unorganized nature of storage so far has meant complex networks with
different systems and software, within the same enterprise. This has required
partnerships for all storage players. HP, for instance, partners with not just
the major pure-storage players like Legato, Veritas and EMC or applications
companies like Microsoft, SAP and People-Soft, but also systems competitors Sun,
IBM, Dell. Clapper says that because of these partnerships and by deploying open
standards "we can now manage over 70 percent of the storage on the
planet".
PRASANTO ROY
(CNS)