CBR last spoke to you not long before the acquisition by HP. Can you tell us a bit about that time?
It was a very exciting time. We at 3PAR understood we were somewhat of a unique property, because when you look generically at the storage industry from the outside there are quite a few starts-ups that were all at about the same pace of development. But what I think was less well understood in the space for storage created to support the delivery of IT as a Service was that there was only really one architecture that had survived over the previous decade – that was ours.
I think that’s why you saw the bidding war erupt, because everyone knew the only buy option was 3PAR if you wanted to address the IT as a Service market and all of the multi-tenancy requirements and so on.
You spoke to us previously about taking market share off the big guys. Was there any part of you that wanted to stay independent to see how far 3PAR could go?
Our entire goal was to stay independent. We felt we were disrupting the market and that the market was coming to us as evolved towards virtualisation and cloud computing. We’d established a position where we were the standard for storage at seven of the top 10 service providers delivering enterprise IT as a Service in the form of public cloud computing. We could see the evolution of private clouds emerging as customers wanted to match the agility and efficiency of the public cloud providers and they wanted to use the same technologies.
We fundamentally saw a bright future. Having said that, the pace at which you can grow as a small company in a very conservative domain, which data storage is, is more limited than other aspects of IT. So we fully recognised that the opportunity that presented itself with HP with massive global distribution and huge channel presence was one that would allow us to accelerate the 3PAR architecture. So there were trade-offs – independence, relatively slower growth versus the opportunity for exponential growth.
So how does it all fit with HP’s cloud plans?
The cloud is all about bringing together best of breed elements of the infrastructure. Best of breed as a term in my mind does not signify market leadership; it means the best functionality and performance/cost profile. HP has set about in each of the critical areas – server, storage, networking, security and management – establishing best of breed capability and tying it all together for cloud and virtualisation.
Earlier this year we announced CloudSystem, a factory-integrated best of breed complete platform that allows you to get a private cloud infrastructure up and running very quickly with all the self-service portal capabilities that exist. We are highly differentiated in being able to provide that complete offering. 3PAR is at the heart of both CloudSystem and Virtual System deployments.
That list of acquisitions and integrated products is something that a number of your rivals are pushing at the moment as well. What separates HP?
If you look at our HP Virtual System we have three implementations – VS 1 and 2 are based around our P4000 LeftHand technology and the VS 3 is around 3PAR at the high end, so you have a scalable set of solutions that can address SMBs right up to service providers and the enterprise. But it’s differentiated from, let’s say, VCE Vblock in that it is an open hypervisor environment, you’re not locked-in to just one option. We think that’s important because in most enterprises they will have requirements from an application infrastructure perspective that cross hypervisors. Other alternatives I suppose include Oracle, but Oracle’s entire Exa-everything stack is highly proprietary.
