Right now we’re watching that space. We’ve been in it before, and we know a lot about it. We don’t have a product there now, and we don’t need one at the present, said Bob Schultz, senior vice president and general manager of HP’s storage business. Asked about the possibility of HP signing an OEM deal with a startup virtualization supplier such as FalconStor Software Corp, Schultz would not rule out the possibility, or rule it in.
HP’s view of virtualization separates HP from almost all of its rivals. IBM Corp, EMC Corp, Veritas Software Corp, Storage Technology Corp, Network Appliance Inc, and Sun Microsystems Inc are all either selling or preparing to launch midrange virtualization products.
Right now HP has no virtualization strategy, and they need to revisit that decision. There is a need, and if they don’t make new products available, they’re going to miss the boat, said ESG analyst Nancy Hurley.
Schultz argued that HP does already offer storage virtualization technology, via its OEMed version of Hitachi Ltd’s Lightning TagmaStore disk array, HP’s own EVA array, and even HP’s OEMed version of Brocade’s multi-protocol SAN router.
But the TagmaStore is a high-end product for large customers only, and costs several hundreds of thousands of dollars, far more expensive than midrange virtualization systems such as IBM’s SAN Volume Controller, which lists from $40,000.
The EVA only virtualizes its own internal storage, and so does not offer the cross-vendor replication functions that help make other virtualization products popular. The reference to Brocade’s router suggests that HP is struggling to bolster its position. At present the router can only be used to link heterogeneous storage networks, and is not a virtualizer of storage capacity.
HP’s sweet spot has not been the enterprise. They’ve been talking about virtualization, but if a midrange customer asks for storage virtualization, the XP [OEMed TagmaStore] is not going to cut it, Hurley said.
Arguing that technology for its own sake never pays, Schultz said customers’ applications of core but enabling storage virtualization technologies are easily handled by existing HP products. People are typically looking to use virtualization for migration. There are plenty of tools that we have for that job, which are server-based. HP officials later said that those tools include the company’s OpenView Storage Mirroring software.
But the scalability and manageability of that software is limited by its use of host-based software. And Hurley said that while many buyers of IBM’s SVC initially only use it for migration, they are soon impressed with its ability to pool cross-vendor disk capacity. And in a recent survey, customers told ESG that the storage functions they most want to see moved off disk arrays is virtualization – defined by ESG as the pooling of cross-vendor capacity – followed in order by capacity provisioning, and volume management. Migration came fifth in the list.
Last week HP told analysts at a conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts that there are storage virtualization arena is mined with pitfalls that HP has had been privileged to experience at first hand. Before their merger, HP and Compaq were both leaders in storage virtualization.
In 2001, HP spent $350m on the stock-swap acquisition of privately held StorageApps Inc, and its appliance-based virtualization system. That made HP the first tier-one storage supplier with its own virtualization product on the table, which was renamed as CASA. But in October last year EMC’s lawyers won an injunction that bans HP from selling CASA, based on an earlier patent-infringement lawsuit won by EMC.
CASA was to be merged with Compaq’s developing VersaStor virtualization technology, to create a system that would be based on Brocade’s Fabric Application Platform smart switch. Versastor suffered some major changes of architecture during its development, and whether or not these were to blame, in December 2003 HP put Versastor development on indefinite hold.
