HP Beefs Up High-End Storage, Talks Up Utilities

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Hewlett-Packard hosted its Americas StorageWorks Conference in the old Compaq hometown of Houston this week, and took the opportunity to talk up a new high-end storage array and its future StorageWorks Grid initiative. HP has been struggling in the past few months to hit its goals in storage sales, and has instituted a number of changes that it hopes will get its storage sales back on track.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal this week, as the HP storage conference got under way, the company had eliminated about half of the storage specialist positions in North America in May 2003, and now it is reinstating about half of those positions. The company conceded that having general sales reps trying to push storage area network sales was not a good idea, and that is why it is bringing back the specialists.

At the StorageWorks show, HP's chairman and CEO, Carly Fiorina, gave the keynote address to over 1,000 customers and partners and made it clear that storage was a big priority to HP and that it would soon be able to capitalize on its substantial investments in virtualization and storage grid software to differentiate from other storage suppliers. But in the meantime, she said, HP was launching a training campaign called Simply StorageWorks, which it will use to educate customers and partners about SAN, virtualization, and other storage technologies. Such education softens up customers and is in effect pre-sales. This education program has been in effect in Europe and is now being rolled out in North America. The storage education has three tracks and will be presented in a 70 city tour of North America for customers and channel partners. The "My First SAN" track explains to small and midsized businesses why they should use SAN technology and what HP products are right for them. The "Easy As NAS" track explains why NAS technologies are still necessary and how they can be used in conjunction with SANs. The "Ultimate Business Protection" track explains the technologies for data backup and restoring as well as other high availability options for storage.

At the show, HP talked up the new StorageWorks XP12000 storage array, a product that it gets on an OEM basis from Hitachi and that it announced in the prior week. This high-end array scales from nine to 1,152 disk drives, providing 165 TB of disk capacity within its frames, using 146 GB disk drives. During the first half of 2005, HP expects to be able to put 300 GB disks in the frames, boosting capacity to 332 TB within a single system. The XP12000 has up to 128 GB of cache memory and has more than twice as much storage capacity and file serving performance as the StorageWorks XP1024, which HP also gets and rebrands from Hitachi. With the XP12000, HP is also allowing other storage arrays in its portfolio to be linked to the controllers in the enterprise array, which can boost the overall capacity of the box to 14 PB. HP's entry Modular Storage Array 1000 arrays, as well as the XP128 and XP1024 enterprise arrays, can be linking in, and HP has promised to soon support the Modular Storage Array 1500 arrays, which use SCSI or Serial ATA drives instead of Fibre Channel disk drives and are therefore a lot less pricey. A base StorageWorks array costs $450,000.

HP also said that it would begin shipping the Cluster Extension XP software for its StorageWorks XP12000 arrays, which support the remote disk mirroring that is necessary for globally distributed high-availability server clusters. Cluster Extension XP provides automatic failover and failback capabilities for XP arrays, much as the MC ServiceGuard software for HP-UX servers provides failover and failback for the HP 9000 and Integrity servers and their applications. In early 2005, HP also plans to introduce a new feature called Continuous Access XP Journaling for the StorageWorks XP12000 arrays, which allows XP12000 arrays to more rapidly journal information from one to many arrays located hundreds of miles apart.

In other storage news, HP said that its StorageWorks XP128 and XP1024 arrays can now be attached to its Unix-based NonStop fault-tolerant servers. In the first half of 2005, HP will support the new XP12000s on the NonStops.

HP also announced a smaller version of one of its prototype StorageWorks Grid products, which is called the Reference Information Storage System, which is a cluster of X86 servers with storage that can store e-mail and Microsoft Office documents. The initial RISS grid came in a 4 TB size, but HP is now selling a 1 TB version that costs under $100,000. The RISS device includes tools for rapidly locating a single e-mail or document, which is useful for complying with a number of information retention laws that have been instituted in the past few years by governments around the world. Over time, HP says, the RISS system will be extended with information lifecycle management (ILM) software so it can archive and retrieve all kinds of information, not just e-mail and Office documents.

In the next few years, HP will take the RISS idea, which it acquired last year, through its purchase of Persist Technologies, to flesh out its own HP Labs development efforts, and will expand it to the StorageWorks Grid concept. The basic idea is to take the grid computing concept that has been popularized in the high-performance computing area and move it into the storage arena. With HPC grids, processing nodes and storage units are loosely coupled together but are managed centrally in a tight fashion, like that of a utility; jobs are created for the grid and dispatched to an appropriate platform (with an appropriate number of nodes to run a job in a specified time) on the grid. With storage grids, HP envisions what it calls Smart Cells, which are storage nodes that are grid-aware and equipped with virtualization, snapshotting, remote copy, and other storage technologies. The smart part of Smart Cells means that each node in the storage grid can be dynamically configured to look like a part of a SAN or a NAS device if the workloads running on servers require it. These Smart Cells will also mask the complexity of the underlying server, disk controller, and disk drive technologies that comprise the cells, and will include layers of virtualization software that also mask the Smart Cell nodes themselves and present the overall storage grid as a single storage entity carved up into SAN and NAS partitions as needed.

This storage grid is a pretty ambitious project, to say the least. But if HP can pull it off, and do so before rivals IBM and EMC, this will give HP a substantial edge in the storage market. But that is a big if, considering the complexity of the development work.