HP Storage Focus: Virtualization, Automation, and Infrastructure Management

As the first calendar quarter of 2008 closes out and the second quarter begins, industry analyst conferences remain at the forefront of vendor activities. HP held its 2008 Technical Solutions Group (TSG) industry analyst summit on April 1st and 2nd at Boston’s Westin Waterfront Hotel. HP’s TSG group represents a close to $40b business that includes servers, storage, software, and services.  At last year’s conference, HP stated that it was on the path to grow TSG and this year EVP Ann Livermore reported a greater than 10% year over year growth rate for TSG as a whole. Enterprise Servers and Storage (ESS) is approximately half of TSG’s business and reported an over 9% year-over-year revenue growth.  It appears that so far HP is executing on its strategy to grow this once struggling business segment.
 
The overall solution set for TSG revolves around the areas of business information optimization (BIO), business technology optimization (BTO), and adaptive infrastructure (AI). BIO consists of products that provide information management, such as discovery & classification, information analytics, and information delivery.  BTO focuses on areas such as application management, performance management, and SOA governance. Adaptive Infrastructure, certainly not a new initiative for HP, focuses on the datacenter functional areas, such as management, security, and automation. The goal of these solution areas is to transform the datacenter to the next generation where low cost commodity-type assets result in an automated, 24x7, lights-out environment.  This is certainly a worthy goal, but not unlike the goals of HP’s competitors. HP touted AI several years ago and that initiative seemed to have gone quiet for a recent period, but is now back in the spotlight. The important point however, is that the explosion of data combined with global demands will absolutely require this type of next-generation datacenter model in order to adequately manage business applications in the future.

The role for storage in this overall strategy is extremely critical. Although this blog post is biased toward storage, it’s safe to say that while servers provide compute power and application support, storage is where the data is kept -- and data is the lifeblood of the business. HP describes its overall vision for storage in the next-generation datacenter as a technology to “bridge the gap between data explosion and storage infrastructure.” The underlying components are categorized as dependability, change-readiness, and cost-effectiveness. Dependability includes the information management functions as well as automation. Change-readiness provides the ability to dynamically adapt as necessary -- modularity and flexibility are emphasized here (this sounds strikingly similar to the initial definition of adaptive infrastructure). And finally, HP addresses cost effectiveness with industry-standard components and a unified management platform. The most critical piece to a cost effective infrastructure is the ability to scale. Scaling with traditional storage components is certainly achievable, but not economically. Only industry-standard components that can be seamlessly added and managed can scale to meet future demands in a reasonably economical manner.
 
Although there was some discussion of infrastructure virtualization, thin provisioning, and SaaS, HP didn’t provide a tremendous amount of product detail.  But of course, the level of content was reasonably appropriate for this analyst meeting. HP has identified many of the critical issues facing CIOs and IT managers, but so have many of its competitors. Nevertheless, HP’s loyal customer base combined with its vast resources has it well positioned to maintain its current growth path and lead the charge to the next-generation datacenter.