'With 3PAR HP can beat EMC, Hitachi and IBM'

BEIJING, CHINA: During the HP World Tour, Mike Prieto, vice president, storage division, Asia Pacific and Japan, HP, talks about why 3PAR is its entry ticket into the high-end storage market and more. Excerpts from an interaction with Deepa Damodaran of CIOL:

CIOL: Why is storage virtualization very low in adoption and do you think converged infrastcruture will solve it to an extent?

Mike Prieto: The ultimate Utopia is to virtualize an infrastructure end-to-end. That is when you get the best return of interest (RoI). Companies have tackled server virtualization for many years and got good RoI. However, what companies have not done is to tackle storage and networking virtualization.

Storage virtualization in isolation has not gone very far and neither is it going to take off now. On the other hand, virtualization on the cloud is going to negate that need in reality.

When it comes to the cloud, virtualization is the first step to it. Our strategy is to drive storage piece, which is predominantly 3PAR, as a sub-component of the cloud strategy. That includes a virtualized infrastructure.

CIOL: How is 3PAR doing in India?

Mike Prieto: India and South East Asia are the fastest growing markets for us. We had a couple of slow years in India. However, the market is doing pretty good now.

When we brought 3PAR about two and a half years back, India was predominantly EVA and XP. All of a sudden, we were trying to drive the 3PAR business and that took a while to get noticed. We had a similar situation in Japan. However, in the rest of the markets, there is a huge demand for 3PAR.

We recently won a $4 million deal in Japan and another $3.5 million in China for 3PAR. We have started to win big deals across the regions. It is our biggest product line now.

CIOL: Will 3PAR give you a step into the higher market segment where HP is still lagging behind its competitors?

 

Mike Prieto: HP is the market leader in the lower market segment with about 20 per cent market share. Whereas, we have only about 2 per cent in the high end! That is not a surprise because we had EVA for so long, which is a mid-range flash form. We also had XP, which is an OEM partnership with Hitachi, and we were successful with these.

At the high end, it was always, EMC, IBM and Hitachi. We are competing with EMC VMax, IBM and Hitachi high-end boxes. At the mid-range, we are competing with EMC VNX, Hitachi and IBM's mid-range boxes. Compellent is just a price play.

Now, we are gaining market share in the high end with 3PAR. Obviously, we are not yet huge, however, we took some shares from Hitachi. EMC and HP are the only vendors who gained in the high end in the last quarter.

With 3PAR's mid-range array, you will see us gaining. We are eyeing triple digit growth year-on-year for 3PAR.

CIOL: Will HP decide to discontinue its EVA range of products now that 3PAR is doing well?

Mike Prieto: 3PAR competes with EVA and XP platforms in many ways. EVA and XP are falling, whereas, 3PAR is gaining market share. We have a product that competes with our own product!

Exciting things are up there for the future. We will continue to support them. At one point, we may decide what to do. For now, it is traditional storage and converged storage.

CIOL: Oracle is pushing its servers along with software as a single box, whereas HP is lacking on the data level being a hardware player. Will that hamper HP?

Mike Prieto: I disagree with that. Putting Exadata into different environments is not going to solve the problem. There has to be an end-to-end solution. We are the only vendor who can offer that.

Yes, we do not operate at the applications level, however at the infrastructure and software levels, we have better capability than Oracle. Oracle has only point solutions. Moreover, we are open, unlike Oracle, who still has a lock-in approach that leads to silos. We work with SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, etc.