HP Discover Product Blitz Features Major Storage, Deduplication News

LAS VEGAS--While Hewlett-Packard may be the world's largest IT vendor and a top-five storage vendor, it has barely a third of the disk sales of storage leader EMC, and virtually nothing in the deduplication market. At least, that was the case prior to day one of its annual customer event Monday, when the company made major pushes into both markets with several announcements.

"We are in the middle of transforming the storage industry," said Dave Donatelli, executive VP and general manager of HP's enterprise group, during a press conference at HP Discover 2012. He said the company is uniquely positioned, as it's the only vendor to design servers, networks and storage. Then he announced several new storage offerings:

HP StoreOnce: HP claims its deduplication offerings are the first to deliver up to 100 Tbytes per hour backup performance and data recovery of up to 40 Tbytes per hour in a single system. HP's new StoreOnce Catalyst software reportedly reduces recovery time, capacity needs and bandwidth costs, and features an "autonomic restart" capability to ensure that backup jobs complete even in the event of hardware failure, reducing the risk of data loss. The StoreOnce B6200 48TB Backup system is available immediately, starting at $250,000. The Catalyst software is also shipping, starting at $37,500.

HP Data Protector 7 (DP7): The new release of the software, built around the Autonomy Intelligent Data Operating Layer, features contextual backup and recovery. DP7 combines cloud-based backup with on-premise physical and virtual information protection. It's available now, with the cloud-based option offered separately via a monthly subscription agreement. Integration with Catalyst and Symantec NetBackup is available now, and Symantec Backup Exec integration will be added in August.

The company also announced a new Flat SAN offering that will reduce complexity and improve server and storage connectivity, eliminating the need for multitier SANs. The Virtual Connect Direct-Attach Fibre Channel for 3Par Storage can reduce storage networking costs by 50% and connections by 80% to 90%. According to the company, it also enables 2.5 times faster provisioning compared with Cisco's VCE offering and reduces storage protocol layers, cutting latency by 55% and speeding operations such as virtual machine I/O and consolidation density. Currently available in limited quantities, Virtual Connect will be offered in volume later this year at no additional charge as part of a BladeSystem Virtual Connect FlexFabric Module.

Next: Reactions to HP Discover AnnouncementsArun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst at Taneja Group, says storage "has the potential to lead HP out of the hole they are in," but that will require "heads-down execution." The next three months will be critical for the company, he says.

"HP now has a scale-out NAS product that can go head to head with EMC Isilon and NetApp 8.1. This alone gives it a $300 million- to $600 million-per-year incremental potential that they would just be starting to enjoy," says Taneja.

Ditto for deduplication. "Now HP has a well-thought-through dedupe product line that can unashamedly go against EMC Data Domain and win," he says. "That adds another $500 million per year or more, revenue potential that they were completely missing out on. On top of this, HP has now enhanced their data protection software, HP Protector, to work with the dedupe unit in a very consistent, holistic way. That should spurt the HP Protector business that has been dull at best, historically."

Taneja says the Autonomy product line still needs to be exploited by HP. "But even if they simply left it alone, it will carry its weight," he says. "The real potential is in energizing the HP sales team, versus the much smaller Autonomy sales team, to sell these products into mainstream HP accounts. I would put this in the 'potential' category relative to the products discussed above, which are in the balls-to-the-wall category."

HP also unveiled Automated Network Management 9.2. It includes enhancements to Network Node Manager i, HP Network Automation, NNMi Performance and NNMi Advanced Smart Plug-in add-on modules, as well as access to new network management key performance indicators for better insight into network availability and performance.

Also new is the HP AppSystem for Apache Hadoop, a turnkey appliance that simplifies setup, provisioning, deployment and optimization of Hadoop clusters, and should make dealing with big data a lot easier. Built on an 18-node ProLiant DL380 cluster, the company says, AppSystem is 3.8 times and 2.6 times faster than Oracle and SGI Hadoop offerings, respectively, and is the first product to process a 10-Tbyte data set in 5,128 seconds (approximately 1.5 hours). HP also introduced a portfolio of reference architectures, tools and white papers to support the top three Hadoop distributions (Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR), as well as new big data and Hadoop-based services.

In big data news, HP announced a new version of its analytics software, Vertica 6 (V6). The new release builds on Vertica's FlexStore architecture, and includes support for the R programming language. V6 runs R programs in parallel within the platform, which allows users to run more analyses on much more data.

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