In the wake of a rocky quarter in the storage market,
Hewlett-Packard (HP) is trying to boost its bottom line in storage
with the creation of a new small and midsized business (SMB) unit
within HP StorageWorks and an upgrade to the All-in-One (AiO) model
based on its latest ProLiant DL320s servers.
The AiO1200 consists of a single 12-drive 2U enclosure that
includes HP's T400 controller. The box can mix SATA and SAS within
the array.
Software wise, the AiO1200 now includes the option of adding
HP's Storage Mirror software for an extra $1,750 for remote
replication, as well as new setup and migration wizard support for
Microsoft Exchange 2007. Plus, the DL320s controller can provision
iSCSI storage for servers running both the 32- and 64-bit versions
of Windows Server 2003.
The HP AiO1200 is available now with 12 drive bays, up to 9
terabytes (TB) of capacity and SATA or SAS options. The list price
for a base configuration is $8,759, higher than the original AiO
400 and 600 models that were introduced last year at around $5,000,
but with 3 TB capacity, while the 400 and 600 models had 1 TB and
1.5 TB capacity respectively.
Like the 400 and 600, The AiO 1200 will be sold primarily
through HP's channel. It's the fourth new HP product released in
2007 designed specifically for SMBs.
Channel partners, meanwhile, are hoping this box will offer a
performance advantage over the earlier models. According to Frank
Vincentelli, senior sales engineer with Integrated IT Solutions of
Waltham, Massachusetts, the AiO product has so far proven to be "a
mature product, which is rare in the SMB iSCSI environment."
However, he said, when the AiO 400 and 600 are expanded using HP's
Modular Smart Arrray (MSA) RAID enclosures, the need for a separate
chassis to hold more disk can cause a performance bottleneck for
users. Vincentelli said he hopes having twice the capacity in the
1200, as well as the SAS connectivity inside the box, will mean
fewer users, particularly on the large side of the SMB market, will
experience performance bottlenecks as the AiO scales.
Vincentelli said he is wary for now of the new replication
software. "I give HP the benefit of the doubt, but with
replication, particularly over the WAN, I want to see it work.
These things are not easy, especially in the SMB market, and we
have seen many [vendors] try and fail."
'A refocusing, not a redirection'
The AiO 1200 is the first product to come out of
a new business unit at HP designed to pump more revenue out of HP's
strongest business, which is SMB products sold through the
channel.
HP has named two executives to the new HP StorageWorks SMB team:
Urs Renggli, director of worldwide SMB activities across the
Technology Solutions Group, will coordinate storage, server,
software and services business units; and Harry Baeverstad, now the
director of SMB within the StorageWorks business unit.
Previously, Renggli was the director of SMB for HP in Europe,
the Middle East and Africa. Baeverstad was the director of the
network attached storage (NAS) business for StorageWorks prior to
its acquisition of clustered NAS vendor PolyServe, which now serves
as the enterprise NAS business unit within HP. According to
Baeverstad, the new business unit will pull together products from
different groups, but employees within those groups will remain
where they are.
"This is a refocusing, not a redirection of our resources,"
Baeverstad said. Half of HP's total revenue as a company comes out
of selling products through its channel to small and midsized
businesses, he said, "but we still see it as a growth opportunity."
Baeverstad declined to say exactly how many AiO customers HP has,
but said they number "in the thousands," and that the product line
is growing "beyond our aggressive expectations," he declined to
share hard numbers there, too.
Still, according to Tony Asaro, analyst with the Enterprise
Strategy Group (ESG), HP does have an edge on its storage
competitors in the SMB market in the form of printers, servers and
PCs. "They already have a great brand in that marketplace," Asaro
said. "HP can go back to those customers and sell other stuff, like
printers and software. What else does EMC and NetApp have to sell
them?"
Asaro said he finds the HP AiO a more "thoughtful" product than
its competitors. "It's not just a watered-down version of their
enterprise storage product," he said. "It's well thought out."
Vincentelli's experience backs this up. "The expectations they
set for this product were met," he said, "which is a long way from
how any of the other big vendors selling into this space have
done."
And there is further opportunity for HP in that space, Asaro
said. "From what I'm seeing, nobody's really taking the world by
storm in the SMB market -- no one can yet claim anywhere near
victory there."
Enterprise storage concerns linger
However, Asaro added, while it may mitigate financial woes
related to sluggish performance in the midsize to large enterprise
segments of its product lines, those problems will continue to
affect HP if more isn't done. "I've heard lots of great roadmap
ideas [from HP] over the last two years, but we have yet to see
proof of execution on most of them," he said. "You lose momentum
when you do that."
In fact, Asaro added, HP might do well to apply some of its
thinking around SMB storage to its enterprise products. "I'd like
to see some of their sensibilities about combining systems,
protocols and tiers of storage into one device moved upmarket," he
said. "It's the opposite of how the other storage guys are
approaching products."
Meanwhile … LeftHand Networks and the DL320s
HP is also launching the DL320s into the enterprise this week,
albeit in a more roundabout way through a meet-in-the-channel deal
with iSCSI storage area network (SAN) player LeftHand Networks
Inc., that will see LeftHand's SANiQ software bundled with HP
DL320s clusters.
According to Baeverstad, what makes the LeftHand version of the
DL320s an enterprise play rather than an SMB play, despite the same
hardware, is the combination of multiple management capabilities
and storage types into a single box on the HP side, while the
LeftHand integration focuses on one aspect of storage -- iSCSI
SAN.
According to LeftHand, the difference is scalability. "The
aggregated LeftHand SAN can scale from a single 320s on up, to over
100 TB," wrote John Fanelli, vice president of marketing for
LeftHand, in an email to SearchStorage.com.
However, Fanelli's response also indicated that LeftHand is
looking to sell into the low end, too. "[LeftHand's] SAN …
satisfies the requirements of customers from the SMB to the
enterprise," he wrote.
"I think generally, we're trying to meet the needs of different
customers," said Baeverstad. But, he admitted, "The top end of the
SMB market can sometimes be a fuzzy line."
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