New HP’s storage strategy: ‘Manage more with less resources’

CIOL catches up with Anupam Nagar, Country Manager, Storage Systems, Hewlett

Packard to discuss the New HP's plans for the Indian market.

What are the Compaq storage products that the new HP has retained?



As part of our merger plans, we have developed clear cut product roadmaps to

take advantage of our strengths. After a careful analysis of the market, we have

decided on what product to keep and what to put on hold. Of course, customers of

these products will be taken care by us. Thus, we have merged with the best of

Compaq’s product portfolios and solutions in the industry.

Based on the roadmaps, we have drawn up certain key plans involving products

and strategies from both organizations and accordingly we will adopt the Compaq

StorageWorks (re-named HP StorageWorks) for storage and storage solutions, HP

OpenView as the name for storage software, and ENSA (Enterprise Network Storage

Architecture) for our architecture.

How do you think the product roadmap will strengthen your position in the

storage market?



HP is strong in the top segment storage solutions and the lower segment
storage solutions, but has missed out on the middle segment. Whereas, Compaq has

a strong hold in that market. Keeping these and the other exigencies, we drew

the product road map to confederate our market hold. We compared and identified

each of the product based on features, price and market share. And in the cases

wherever there was an overlap, we decided to chose the one that would best meet

the customer requirements. We will consolidate and streamline our portfolio

under different ranges like:

Online storage: We have decided to offer StorageWorks EVA(Enterprise

Virtual Array) architecture along with our own HP Virtual Array(VA) solution, in

this range. At the high end, we will continue to offer both HP-XP and

StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA). While HP-XP enables storage

consolidation through a modular, monolithic, scalable and highly available

storage system where as StorageWorks EVA will provide high-end functionalities

for maximum storage efficiency, high availability and lower TCO.

Nearline storage: After the selection of products, we have retained

ones that offer the maximum advantage to our customers. We will continue to

offer tape storage technologies such as DLT and also Compaq’s midrange and

lower range tape libraries. In the high-end tape drive segment, we will offer

both Ultrium and SDLT.

Optical storage: We will continue to offer our strongly positioned,

magneto-optical storage ,archival storage products including optical disk drives

and jukeboxes.

What are your post-merger storage strategies?



Our key vision is to ‘manage more with less resources’. The objective is
to merge both the vision and strategy effectively so that the customer has

minimum impact of the merger but maximizing business benefits. We will continue

to provide support to our earlier product offering and no product will be

dropped without considering customer's needs.






As I said, to tap the mid-range market, we will adopt the Compaq StorageWorks
for storage and storage solutions, HP OpenView for storage software and ENSA. In

addition, we will continue with our Storage Gold Partner scheme of tying up with

channel partners to capture this market.

Besides, in place of our earlier SureStore strategy, we have now adopted the

FSAM(Federated Storage Area Management) strategy for optimal use of storage

resources and Storage Virtualization would be our key technology that will be

aggressively promoted.

In a scenario where high end storage concept is yet to take off in a big way

here, how are you promoting DR solution? Do you think Indian market is ready?



As far as technology is concerned, all storage technologies are available
here in India and companies are eager to adopt the latest ones. However, network

storage is yet to catch up on a large scale. Traditionally the Indian market

always has ‘early adopters’ and rational adopters who follow a ‘wait and

watch’ policy and go for time tested processes. Our strategy cannot be based

on majority alone and we have a focussed strategy to provide our specialization

to industries that needs Disaster Recovery(DR) solutions more.

Nevertheless, technologies like remote backup, online recovery,

enterprisewide storage consolidation and disaster recovery need to get more

popular with more reliable links and with connectivity cost coming down over a

period of time. New technologies like virtualization or iSCSI is also expected

to evolve over a couple of years or so.

DR market is now restricted only to large corporates. Interestingly some of

the largest DR solution implementations are done in India. The concept of

insurance of most critical business asset, which is ‘data’, has to be

realized by the top management. The RoI can only be realized over a period of

time, known as buyback period as well as how the business is impacted if the

critical data is lost.

With so many players in the storage market, what do you say about price wars?



The price wars are mainly where storage is sold as ‘boxes’. Though
competition is everywhere and competition drives the price war, in large storage

consolidation /business continuity projects, price does not become the key

factor. The capability of the vendor and the project feasibility becomes the

main criteria in vendor selection.

How big is the SAN/NAS market in India and what is its position in the

segment?



India is still a DAS(direct attached storage) market, but as per IDC, the
potential as well as the growth is expected to be high in SAN/DAS market in

India. Last year, the DAS market might have been as high as 80 per cent to 85

per cent but this year, especially, there has been good growth in low end SAN

environment. Also, there have been few very large SAN projects with

enterprisewide business continuity implementations.






What are the trends in the APAC storage market?



The trend is on backup as well as storage consolidation. Large corporations

are also looking at DRS(Disaster Recovery Solutions) and investing in metro

clustering as well replication of datacenters.