HP Will Stop XP (From Hitachi), Replaced by 3par

When HP bought 3par for the foolish price of $2.4 billion last September, it was not easy to position the newly-acquired Utility Storage systems in the HP storage line at more than $100,000, somewhere between EVA 6400/8400 and open XP disk arrays.

3par models debuts at 16/192 HDDs with the F200 at a maximum of 128TB up to the T800 culminating at 800TB with 1,280 HDDs, this latter with 4U chassis of 40 HDDs. The HP XP OEMed from HDS for mainframes or open systems reaches 2PB to 2.26PB without extension. EVA goes up to 324TB with 324 HDDs.

HP had to take a decision to unify its high-end storage offering. It will stop to resell HDS, according to our sources, replaced by current new higher-end 3par units to come and more adapted for the cloud. It’s not surprise as former 3par CEO David Scott is the new senior VP and GM of HP StorageWorks. Furthermore, "in six months, we sold more 3par units in revenues than in one year", said an HP representative.

HP has installed a lot of XPs able to connect to open systems and mainframes, but is not involved in the IBM’s zEnterprise market. To fill the capacity gap with XP, HP will announce a new version of 3par Utility Storage with around 1,900 HDDs or more than 1PB as well as the possibility to aggregate more nodes (currently 2 to 8).

To prove the continuity of aging EVA, the company is supposed to launch at the end of May a new PS6000 version (with thin provisioning?). Under EVA, there is now the P4000 from LeftHand.

Mid-range HDS AMS are no anymore resold by HP. But even if the U.S. giant is "selling as much Hitachi technology than HDS in the world", according to an HP source, and didn’t see a drop in sales of high-end P9500, the decision has been made to stop to resell the storage systems of the Japanese company.

After definitively losing Oracle/Sun, HDS will lose another OEM, its last big one. It has now no choice but to push its direct sales, what the company is currently doing.