By William Fellows

Hewlett-Packard Co says it has not seen any downtick in its storage business due to Y2K but isn’t making a lot of noise about it in view of IBM Corp’s troubles. HP said it sold 300 of its Hitachi Data Systems Ltd-sourced XPS256 enterprise storage systems in the three months during which rival EMC Corp got 1900 systems out of the door. HP claims the storage connect proportion of its overall computer systems business is $0.35 in the dollar, an amount it expects to rise to more than $0.50 in customers’ planned IT spending by 2001. HP says EMC’s ControlCenter storage management applications announced on Tuesday gave it the perfect opportunity to come out and support third party storage products in an open fashion, but it didn’t.