Full disclosure - I worked as a marketing director in the HP storage business from 2007 to 2011 and still own some HP stock.
Jean-Jacques Maleval recently wrote an article for Storage Newsletter entitled "HP: Fiscal 2Q14 Financial Results - When fall will stop in storage business?" In the article he expresses little confidence in the optimism Meg Whitman has for a turnaround in HP storage, and he shares the table at the bottom of this post.
It is clear to see that HP Storage revenue is in decline over the last two years but this is not a short term trend there has been little growth in the last 4 years. Now it was of course 4 years ago that with Dave Donatelli at the helm, HP acquired 3PAR in a bidding war with Dell. As recently as January this year Business Insider hailed 3PAR as one of HPs most succesful acquisitions and by some metrics it has been. However when you look at the overall goal for HP as a portfolio company they have failed to capitalize on 3PAR to rapidly grow the overall storage business and I would also venture to suggest that it has not helped in an appreciable way the other enterprise businesses either.
HP believes that Converged Systems portfolios incorporating 3PAR and other HP storage technologies will drive more revenues over time. I am inclined to agree with them but here is the rub. They were arguably further ahead with converged systems before the 3PAR acquisition. 3PAR may be great storage technology, but it was a reset for HP convergence plans and that time lapse let new market entrants like Nutanix and larger organizations such as Cisco (Partnering with EMC) to get a foothold that they should not have had the opportnuity to get. HP had a leading server market position that it could capitalize on to drive time to market for convergence. I wrote the HP Analyst presentation for their 2008 analyst meeting all around this.
Dave Donatelli saw an opportunity to revamp the HP Storage business but the refocus of the storage business on 3PAR did not allow HP to capitalize quickly enough on HP server leadership to drive convergence leadership. The 3PAR acquisition initially drove a wedge between the Server teams, who had some excellent storage technology, and the Storage teams who were building all of their products on servers, but not necessarily ProLiant. At a time when the technology was more converged than ever the teams were further apart.
I believe that Meg Whitman is fixing this issue and that HP has a very solid focus on converged systems. But, howerver succesful the growth of the 3PAR product line is, it must be judged by the overall impact on HP. Dave Donatelli made a bold move with the 3PAR acquisition, but may ultimately have paid the price for the lack of overall Enterprise product growth when he left HP earleir this year after being replaced in the Enterprise Systems role. Remember at the time of the 3PAR acquisition, which coincided with Mark Hurd leaving HP, Donatelli was a rising star. Time will tell if HP can make up ground it ceeded to competitors in the converged systems market and fully realize the potential of the 3PAR acquisition. That potential though can not be simply about storage and certainly not only 3PAR.
Note: HP is promising more news on Backup, Recovery and Archiving at HP Discover.
HP Revenue for storage only (without services, $ million)
Today NetApp announced new storage systems, the NetApp FAS8000 series. Key elements of the announcement include:-
Up to 3X more Flash (Maximum total flash of 18TB, with max flash cache of 8TB to increase performance up to 2X. Note: The Flashcache still seems small to me for some use cases as it has to be mirrored and can therefore only scale to less than 0.1% orf the raw capacity of a max config system. Flash cache size and scalability across different arrays is an interesting topic for a future post.
Expandability up to 4.8PB and 1200 disks in the FAS8060.
New FlexArray Virtualization Software supporting both SAN and NAS, to virtualize legacy storage behind FAS systems and speed customers deployment of storage clouds.
The latest release of clustered DataONTAP (cDOT).
One of the interesting elements of the announcement is the new FlexArray Virtualization Software. Virtualization of legacy arrays is not an uncommon function in other arrays or in software, but it is not one that has been widely embraced or succesful in the past. StoreAge was a software-based storage virtualization pioneer and was purchased by LSI back in 2006. The Storage virtualization software was OEM'd from LSI by HP and delivered as a virtualzation solution called the SAN Virtualization Services Platform (SVSP). I managed storage products including SVSP at HP where it was used as a way of providing a services level consolidation engagement for large entrprise customers. Whislt there were some very large and visible customers who used the software it never achieved volume traction and LSI eventually paired back investment and eventually sold the technology to NetApp as a part of the Engenio acquisition. It would be interesting to know if any of StoreAge technology is being used in NetApps implementation.
FlexArray virtualization is made available through a software feature in DataONTAP 8.2.1 and is available on all NetApp FAS8000 systems. Initial support seems to be for EMC, HDS, and NetApp E-Series Arrays. NetApp is clearly positioning FlexArray virtualization as a way to migrate legacy array capacity to the cloud and more quickly build out cloud migrations. We will have to wait and see what kind of adoption it gets but it does offer the opportunity for customers to simplify existing heterogeneous storage implementations. Other arrays from Hitachi, HP, EMC etc, also offer virtualization of legacy arrays.
As a part of the Announcement NetApp is also building out their partner ecosystem to provide value added services and software. For more on the potential implications of the NetApp announcement for consolidation of storage and data protection infrastructure, you can read my guest blog on the Catalogic Software website.
The FAS8000 platforms, FlexArray Virtualization Software, and clustered Data ONTAP 8.2.1 are available now.
As a storage marketer in a vendor, there is always a lot of pressure to determine the category you are in, so you can clearly lay out your value proposition to customers. It also helps you define your competitive set. If possible you want to define a category because being identified as a first mover and controlling a category definition is gold dust. Well in storage we are blessed with a plethora of category definitions and lately it seems like everyone wants to be a part of them all.
As I mentioned in a previous blog I was a participant in a recent interesting CrowdChat on the emerging category of Server SANs. You can find my original post here. During the debate it was clear that there are a lot of interesting takes on the definition of Server SANs and those bleed into the broad definition of Software Defined Storage and the definitions of Converged Infrastructure, Converged Storage, and vSANs. Wikibon has taken a cut at defining the Server SAN. I am not sure I agree with it all, but to move the discussion along I thought I would expand on their initial take and broaden the discussion. I am as interested in a set of definitions that can be understood as anyone else. As a Zoologist I know the power of having a good taxonomy.
Let’s first take a cut at some definitions for some of the most used terms in current vendor marketing materials. (These are my takes, you can find others on the web and I reference some at the end of the article)
Software Defined Storage – a Storage system created from software that runs on an industry standard server. To be truly software defined all of the storage functions and data handling (e.g., RAID, compression, deduplication) need to be part of the software stack. To be truly software defined the platform should be delivered as software and not as an appliance.
vSAN – A highly available storage system that can be built from running storage software as a virtual machine appliance.
Converged Storage – A Storage Appliance that is built on an Industry Standard Server base. There are really two separate categories within this. 1) Storage that uses an unchanged Industry Standard Server base and standard Ethernet networking with all storage data handling done in software. 2) Traditional Storage platforms that use hardware based RAID controllers or other offload engines for elements of the storage data processing, or uses a less accepted network protocol (e.g. serial ATA). There are very few traditional storage platforms left not using X-86 processors as the underlying technology. Equalogic and the NetApp products acquired from LSI come to mind as examples of non-converged storage.
Converged Infrastructure – A standardized Infrastructure with a common management framework that crosses, Server, Storage and Networking.
There are other technologies in play that can be confused with this so let me give my simple attempt definitions in the table below. I do not claim these to be definitive (I have not found a generally accepted set of definitions). I am using this as a way to differentiate technologies and facilitate discussion.
Server SAN - No this is not a Japanese Server. It is a single product, that delivers both server and SAN functionality. That being, it can run the apps that you run on your servers today in virtual machines, and it also provides a highly available storage backend that delivers typical storage functionality.
Hybrid Storage – A storage appliance that blends hard disk drives and solid state into a single solution. Note:-Most storage solutions can be called hybrid by this definition. “True” hybrid vendorswill state that this capability should be designed from the ground up for efficiency and that the movement of data between HDD and SDD should be based on caching. These purpose built hybrid systems often cannot be purchased without SSD.
You will notice from these definitions that there is certainly overlap.
Figure 1 Overlap of Storage system definitions.
Note:-Traditional Storage systems not within the above definitions such as Dell Equalogic are not included. Note:-Hybrid storage is not included as a category in this map although a popular term. All of the above categories offer hybrid storage solutions.
From the diagram you can see that a vSAN is also a Server SAN and Software Defined Storage. There are many other overlaps in the definitions. Let’s look at some examples of these technologies and break these categories down further:-
** vSANs can also credibly be placed in the converged Infrastructure bucket.
Examples are not exhaustive. They are meant to be illustrative.
Now with examples placed against the definitions we can see that a number of products fit into multiple categories. This is not ideal when building taxonomy. In Biology, an Ant cannot be an Arthropod and a Chordate, because those are two distinct Phyla. In technical marketing we seem unable to even agree what Domain some technologies are in. It is the world in which we live. As a vendor claiming to be “Software Defined Storage” or “Converged Infrastructure” or placing yourself in any other category becomes an important tool to help highlight your value and competitive set to a target customer. As we can see at the moment the proliferation of definitions does not help provide customers with the clarity they want and deserve.
I don’t claim to have an answer. There may not be one. However a healthy debate on this is needed. I am interested in your thoughts. If we humans can work out a system that applies to millions of species maybe we can find one that applies more simply to technology and in this case storage.
Update (03/06/2014) -VMware has just annjounced availability of their vSAN and claim it to be a vSAN, software defined storage , and converged infrastructure. All are true. It will be interesting to see if this enhanced oush by VMware will accelerate adoption of more vSANs and how the market plays out between the vSAN vendors who have been around for a while and the VMware implementation which is built into the hypervisor. Have the current vSAN vendors missed their opportunity now VMware is fully in the market or will this announcement float all boats? Time will tell.
On Janaury 27th 2014, Catalogic Software was born. Catalogic was previously SyncsortDB and can now count itself amoungst the myriad of data protection vendors in the market. Catalogics unique take is that by using existing equipment (NetApp as the backup Server), and by managing your data better you can both lower costs, and improve recovery point and recovery time objectives.
Apart from a unique approach to backup with Catalogic DPX they also provide Catalogic ECX for Cataloging of data. This is an important element in any data reduction and information lifecycle management strategy.
Catalogic was kind enough to ask me to write a guest blog for them and you can find my first entry here.
For an introduction to Catalogic you can also listen to an interview with Catalogic CEO Flavio Santoni talking to truth in IT.
Welcome to my blog. My name is Lee Johns and you can find me on twitter as @StorageOlogist. I have been in the technology industry in a variety of roles for 30 years.
I started my career at Compaq Computer in 1984, so I have been through the growth of the PC business, the advent of Industry Standard Servers the introduction of shared storage, and along the way have also been responsible for bringing to market printers and enterprise software. I have worked for some of the largest technology companies in the world, and also been involved with startups. My most recent role was as the VP of Product Management at Starboard Storage who just, (Jan 2014), sold their technology to SGI.
I also have a degree in Zoology and hence the title of my blog. You see I have found alot of parallels between the theory of Natural Selection (survival of the fittest), and the technology ecosystem in my time running business and marketing groups for technology companies. It applies broadly to a products chance of survival within a corporation, and within the broader market. After all we have all seen the Technology Dinosaurs wiped out by a change in the competitive landscape.
What is interesting is that the real Dinosaurs did not see the meteor coming. The Technology Dinosaurs almost always do. They just can't stop watching the meteor (Competitive Disruption), until it lands on them. My mission in any job I have been in is to make sure that I keep my eyes open, and as soon as I see anything that might be a meteor galvanize support to get out of its way, or mine it for precious metal. IT dollars are precious and you have to find your edge in getting inherently conservative buyers to hand them over.
So what can you expect from this blog? Well I hope to provoke thought. As simple as that. I will obviously be discussing things that happen in the industry but will also cover some things from outside technology which are relevant to the technology industry. Things that I find interesting and I hope you will too.
I am a consultant on the WTCNeed team. and you can find my profile here
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