One year after Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Compaq officially
became one company, HP has not yet finished merging its storage
product line.Some product phase-outs and new product
introductions are scheduled for later this year. Still, analysts
are impressed with the progress.
Compaq ruled the storage front in Europe, the
Middle East and Africa before it was bought and many Compaq names,
products and people remain at HP's storage division, which also had
to cut about 10% of its staff as a result of the merger and the
economic downturn.
About 60% of the people at HP's Network
Storage Solutions unit come from Compaq, including Howard Elias,
general manager of the unit and an HP senior vice-president, and
Olaf Swantee, vice-president EMEA.
"They do the merger well. They select the best
people and the best products; there is no battle and no hostages
are being taken," said Josh Krischer, a Germany-based research
director with Gartner.
ENSA (Enterprise Network Storage Architecture)
was Compaq's storage strategy and has been adopted by HP, which had
its own FSAM (Federated Storage Area Management) strategy. Carly
Fiorina, HP's chairman and chief executive officer, this year spoke
at ENSA@Work, originally a Compaq event.
"Both strategies went in the same direction,
with the objective to provide storage as a utility," said Martin
Regli, EMEA manager product management for HP's storage unit. Regli
is also from Compaq.
Under its ENSA Extended strategy, formulated
in April 2002, HP is focusing more on storage management and
storage virtualisation and less on the actual San, Nas and Raid
(redundant arrays of inexpensive discs) hardware. Based on that
strategy, the company decided which products would stay and which
products would have to go, Regli said.
The first overlap was in the interconnect
area. Both HP and Compaq resold switches for storage networks from
Brocade and McData. The merged HP is still working on a new switch
portfolio, Regli said.
Looking at the actual data storage hardware,
HP also has some work to do to get to a clear product
portfolio.
For small companies, requiring up to 6Tbytes
of storage capacity, the line up is clear. The MSA1000, previously
from Compaq, is the only offering, since HP had no competing
product. "It was kind of an adopt and go," Regli said.
It gets more complex at the mid-range level,
for companies requiring about 8Tbytes of storage. Both HP and
Compaq offered products at that level and those are still sold
today, but will be phased out later this year and replaced by a
mid-range version of Compaq's EVA (Enterprise Virtual Array)
product for the enterprise.
HP's virtual array 7100 and 7400 series will
be phased out later this year and so will Compaq's modular array
8000 mid-range system.
"We will only have one mid-range product,"
Regli said.
In the enterprise area, where one system can
hold about 35Tbytes of data, Compaq has its EVA offering, while HP
resells the Freedom 9900 system from Hitachi Data Systems as the HP
disc array XP1024.
The systems are different; the EVA is good for
a storage network, while the XP1024 is meant for a mainframe
environment.
"We will keep both, because they are
different," Regli said.
In back-up tape libraries, both HP and Compaq
had different reseller agreements. HP sold StorageTek products from
Storage Technology while Compaq resold Quantum and Overland Storage
products. The merged HP dropped Storage Technology.