I don't know what I'd do without Chris Mellor of The Register; he's always good on ferreting out the news about various storage vendors and this one tickled me. HP taking yet another storage product, I think they are trying to out-do IBM in the sheer number of different products that they are doing in the storage market.
Poor old SGI must be crying as they've been punting the LSI Storage product for some time as seen here, now HP come along and are touted as a mystery Tier 1 vendor; poor SGI!
But is there a real story here? Are HP acknowledging that the EVA really isn't a scalable as they would like to pretend? Are they acknowledging that the native Thin Provisioning offered by the EVA is a bit weak? Snapshots?
I looked at the LSI 8400 DPM earlier in the year and it looks like an okay solution; its snaps look nice and it looks ideal for a SME type environment but I had concerns about its scalability; funny that, I also have concerns about the EVA scalability.
But what are HP doing?? We've got XPs, EVAs, Polyserve, solutions built on Windows Storage Servers, strange things being done with Oracle, Lefthand Networks and I'm sure there is more. As a large customer of HP (but not their storage), it worries me to see such an incoherent strategy at the moment. I don't know, perhaps they are gearing up to fall out with Hitachi? Nah, that'd never happen, would it?
I agree, Chris provides a valuable service to all of us. He’s quite different in person, though, if you’ve ever met him.
Although Chris initially forecasted Dell, I knew it’d be HP.
Why?
They appear to be methodically working off a category map.
NAS — hmmm — HP doesn’t have any of that, let’s go do PolyServe
iSCSI — hmmm — need that for the smaller market, don’t we? Let’s snap up LeftHand for that one.
Storage virtualization? IBM is killing HP with SVC, and they compete worse than EMC and NetApp. Need one of those things as well, right?
So, what left in the stack?
Storage management — open.
Dedupe technology — open.
One could argue about some of their weaker bits, e.g. CAS, NAS, etc. — but at least they have some coverage.
Now, here comes the hard part. Leveraging all the different investments. Providing integration and commonality. And so on.
EMC is not perfect on this front, but we’re continually getting better, because we understand it’s important.
Thanks for sharing.
Storage management — Storage Essentials.
Dedupe technology — AIP, VLS, Data Protector.
This is just another layer of virtualisation. It could front the EVA, or in fact any other vendor’s array. The product doesn’t really replace the high end HDS gear or even the mid range EVA. But it does provide a lot of flexibility especially around array pooling, multivendor replication and data migration. A working Invista if you will 🙂
Completely agree that it doesn’t replace the high-end Hitachi gear (I’m being nice and calling it Hitachi, not HDS, HP hate it when you call it HDS gear) but HP have a voracious appetite for storage products and storage companies (no, I don’t think they are about buy LSI, that would be too awkward with the number of people who OEM LSI kit at the moment). This appetite could end up in ‘eyes too big for their belly’ resulting in a nasty case of indigestion.
Integrating all these products and companies will take time and energy. And HP are a company which is trying to do an awful lot at the moment.
And when you say working Invista; what you actually meant to say is a working Invista with built-in Recoverpoint or perhaps vice-versa.
Maybe he meant “workable” Invista… 😉
The few people I have spoken to who have tried Invista are quite happy with what it does for them; they’d like it to do more but it works these days. I’ve not heard any horror stories but I have heard the odd horror story about SVC but I suspect that is because there are more SVC installs out there and the odd one will go wrong.
One of the problems I have with Invista is that it is so under-whelming. There’s nothing which makes me go ‘Wow, that’s clever!’; the LSI product for instance, the first time they described their Snaps, did make me go ‘Wow, that’s clever and useful….just make it bigger!’