History 2003: HP Got Persist

Until now, Hewlett-Packard has hardly been the most dynamic storage player in the ILM segment. Who even knew that the company had an archiving software called DSpace, a (free) product for digital libraries that has been virtually confidential, developed in tandem with MIT following a project that started in 2000, in which HP Labs invested $1.8 million?

Since the merger with Compaq in 2001, HP has also not completed a single acquisition in the storage industry, in marked contrast to its competitors. To keep up appearances, at least, HP did launch an ILM partner program this year, in which we find such companies as Avamar, CommVault, Grau, Ixos, KVS, Legato, Mirapoint, Orchestria, Persist (already), Princeton Softech and QStar.

With the recent acquisition of storage start-up Persist Technologies for an undisclosed price, HP both reassures observers and concretely enters the ILM market. This tightly-held company based in Pleasanton, CA is a spin-off of Zantaz and was founded in 2002 by former Zantaz technical executives Jean-Luc Chatelain, CTO and Philippe Ciampossin, VP engineering, and has received $11 million funding. Its CEO is Paul O’Brien.

The company offers an Intel/Linux appliance based on ATA drives with, most importantly, a proprietary AppStor software ($45,000/TB) to archive email, Microsoft Office documents and other files formats such as PDF. It provides APIs for software application vendors, but the product also supports industry standards, including IMAP, SNMP, HTTP, and SOAP. As with EMC’s Centera, the documents are filed as objects with a unique key.

Persist will become a part of HP’s Network Storage Solutions organization, but don’t expect to see Persist software in the catalogue before a year.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 191 on December 2003 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.