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'HP is uniquely positioned to be converged infra leader'

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Deepa
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BANGALORE, INDIA: HP isn't much disturbed by analyst reports which say it has lost its market share to EMC and NetApp. There is a reason for it. The company has made significant investments in high growth areas like big data and storage and is optimistic about high returns.

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Brad Parks, Converged Infrastructure Strategist for HP Storage in an interaction with Deepa Damodaran of CIOL, on the sidelines of HP Discover 2012, talks about why converged infrastructure strategy is so important for the company and how the company is successful in areas that it has focused on. Excerpts:

CIOL: Why is HP emphasizing so much on converged infrastructure?

Brad Parks: We see an opportunity for customers to save time and also speed up delivery time of new services by converging and thus removing complexity in their environment.

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I was an IT director for many years before joining HP. Traditionally, one of the biggest challenges for an IT department is when two technology domains start working together, such as during a hand off from networking to computing or from computing to storage.

It is the technology hand off that creates time and expense. In the last 10 to 20 years we have seen that all of those technology hand-offs have caused the wastage of operating budget and resource time. Customers keep spending just to maintain what they have and so are not able to spend much on innovations, or new IT services and thus losing a chance to their company to be more competitive by eliminating boundaries and simplifying technology hand-offs.

Converged infrastructure will eliminate a lot of that cost and make it faster to deliver new services so that companies can essentially run much leaner on their operating model and spend more time and money on innovation and new services. It is something that we started talking about in 2009 and now all the major competitors in the industry have started to talk the same. So, it is not just an HP trend but has now become an industry trend as customers see value in it.

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We are uniquely positioned because of the intellectual property and engineering that we have in every technology domain across management, server, storage, networking and even power and cooling facilities in order to eliminate a lot of these technology hand-offs.

CIOL: How much will the new announcements help in boosting HP's storage portfolio? According to the analyst reports, HP has lost its market share to EMC and NetApp.

Brad Parks: There is always a story behind the numbers that you see. If you look at the traditional storage categories, such as tape, it is an industry that is on decline. Whereas, on the other front, there are high growth areas such as de-duplication, big data, storage or IT as a service that are making big returns.

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We have made significant investment in these high growth areas and have been successful in snatching marketshare from these companies. At the same time, legacy infrastructure that our competitors are dealing with in the high end, is where we gained 2.6 per cent share with 3PAR and our major competitors had to lose.

We are very successful in areas that we are focused on, and which are high end growth areas. That is why Gartner featured us on its magic quadrant as leaders for mid range and high-end disk arrays. High disk array segment, which Gartner measures as $3,000 and above is where 3PAR 10000 class is featured. It is deployed by three out of four largest service providers in the world as they realized the benefits of multi-tenant environment.

Similarly, in purpose built back-up appliance segment we have gained significantly. We are one among the only two companies who have two digit marketshare in that space. It has long been dominated by the likes of EMC. Moreover, since the introduction of StoreOnce, last year, we have doubled our marketshare and are making an impact there as well.

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CIOL: Why do you say HP StoreOnce Catalyst is better and faster than EMC's DD990?

Brad Parks: In June we announced HP StoreOnce Catalyst, a piece of software that allows one to offload de-duplication process application into an application server or a media server four times faster before it is transferred to a centralised HP StoreOnce Backup system.

Data domain also has a similar competing technology called Boost. HP StoreOnce B6200 Backup, with StoreOnce capability when compared with EMC's DD990 with Boost technology is much better as we can injest at 100TB an hour, which is three times faster than EMC' product at that price point and we can restore 40TB an hour, which is five times faster than that of EMC'. B6200 is a virtual tape library or straight backup to disk target.

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