HP's plunging storage revenues could yet be saved The good ship HP is being held back by many things and storage ain't helping, yet. The one brightspot there - 3PAR - can't overcome plunging revenues elsewhere. The company reported its second quarter of its financial 2013 revenues yesterday. Within the overall Enterprise Group, the storage segment declined 13 per cent year-on …
I was looking at the midrange "converged" offerings from HP, and they really aren't that compelling.
Don't get me wrong, if you want a fast lump of block storage thats solid and reliable, the HP all the way. (we have two fully loaded p2000s) However, if you want to do file exports then it, on the face of it all falls apart. You have the choice of the "storevirtual" stuff, which when we looked at it at the beginning of this year looked pretty weak.(especially compared to netapp fas32** and VNX5***)
If I was going to risk things then I'd plump for a nextenta or similar. ZFS is starting to look really strong. Once the AD integration is sorted then It'll be a killer app. (I'm planning on using it for our nearline to see how good it is.)
The other issue is HP software, if they seriously want me to buy software(or "appliances") from them they need to actually *test* it first. The prime example is dataprotector. It would choke on a million files. Bare in mind it was shipped with a 48 tape LTO5 library, you'd have though it would have been able to handle such things.
If I was HP, I'd be thinking about a strategic linkup with nexenta to flog pre-configured d6000 or the like. It'd be nice to get software support from people who actually appear to *test* and proper hardware support that HP normally delivers.
Is to build those 7000-series 3PAR boxes faster.. they can't keep up with demand.
Not sure where the bottleneck is, but the demand for those things has just exploded(as I expected, it's an incredible product line at an even more incredible price). Not sure if El reg saw the recent SPC-1 results for the all flash 7400 - slaughtered the competition on performance, latency and price (all by wide margins). 250k IOPS at less than 1ms latency.
SecretBatCave - if your mentioning Nexenta and 3PAR in the same post there's just no reply to that. If that's your line of thinking I just don't know what to say (I say this as a Nexenta customer for the past year, and 3PAR for the past 7 years).
Now I'm just waiting for the day HP pulls the plug on Lefthand. Keep it around as a VSA.
I wonder how well Dell is handling Compellent these days...how's that consolation prize working for you Dell!! :)
IBM Storage division not doing well -redundancies pending
NetApp storage not doing well - redundancies announced
EMC storage not doing well - redundancies made
HP are in similar shape.
The amount of data, and hence storage, is increasing each and every year - so where is all the data being stored. If it's "in the cloud" who's providing all the storage ?
"If you want to do file exports then it, on the face of it all falls apart. You have the choice of the "storevirtual" stuff"
Try StoreEasy combined with your P2000 or even better a 3PAR 7000 series array, problem solved, you'll outperform either of the above and will have native AD integration out of the box. StoreVirtual only competes with the VNX5** & FAS32** in very specific environments (campus DR solutions) It's main competitor is VNXe, Equalogic, FAS2xx so your not doing a like for like.
"The prime example is dataprotector. It would choke on a million files. Bare in mind it was shipped with a 48 tape LTO5 library."
You sure you were using DP and not Data Protector Express - the free version that ships with tape drives ? Either way if you have to backup a million files in a file system, you need to be looking at something other than a standard tree walk of the file system, e.g image based backups, source based dedupe, snapshots, synthetic backups etc. DP is an enterprise product, as such it needs to be sized correctly and is not something you would normally implement without additional services or upfront training.
@work we're currently in the process of purchasing another 100TB of block storage - not that much, but we're a SMB. Since we're bound by the IBM SVC compatibility matrix we called up several vendors who are on that list. HP/3PAR was one of those who seemed to fit our needs/whishes. Got one "what do you want"/"hollywood principle"-call back from a 1st level sales droid, stating that our request will be passed on to storage sales. Nothing but silence since then. After two more attempts from our side to get in contact, we finally got the implied message, that apparently HP does not need our business. No hard feelings here, but also no sympathy for sales figures taking a dive @HP.
Maybe you should have tried a channel partner, To be honest though, if you're putting a 3PAR behind SVC then your effectively crippling the 3PAR. Sure it'll work, but pretty much all the advantages 3PAR brings to the table including performance would be undermined by SVC sitting in the data path, P2000 might be a better option there, cheap and cheerful JBOD with basic functionality, so you're not paying for features that are masked by SVC and which you effectively can't use.
Frank, I've tried finding you on LinkedIn but to no avail. If you are still in the market for the capacity then maybe the admin of the site could exchange our details? I do agree with the other poster who replied saying that putting 3PAR behind SVC is diluting the benefits of 3PAR, but the 7000 range is very cost effective so you could still see a benefit in going with 3PAR. The new MSA's will absolutely fly so they could be an option if supported.
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