How good is HP's storage lineup?

There was an interesting article by David Scott, the SVP and GM of HP Storageworks. In his commentary, he said that recent EMC's new products announcement were "repackaging of old architectures" and this has stirred up this hornet's nest.

He went on saying HP's storage solutions are more innovative, touting Ibrix, 3PAR, LeftHand and HP's StoreOnce technology.

I, Sir, tend to disagree with Mr. David Scott. Customers do not buy storage based on innovation and technology alone. A customer's buying decision is a mix of many things including innovation and technology. One of the key factors is a peace of mind because they are entrusting their information and data, their entire company's lifeblood into the storage solution they have implemented.

Some factors include solution integration, completeness of solution lineup, customer support. However, in my experience with HP in Malaysia, I tend to see that EMC is better in every department.

I am not doubting the technology that HP has purchased but where is HP's Ibrix? Bought almost 3 years ago, Ibrix seemed to gone into a black hole whereas scale out NAS solutions such as Isilon (bought by EMC last year), BlueArc, and even NetApp have been establishing their presence.

LeftHand in Malaysia has been quiet and is sticking out like a sore thumb in the HP storage lineup. The sales are out there confused. Should they sell EVA because that's the flagship product, or should they sell some LeftHand just to fill up their sales matrices? Mind you, LeftHand is a totally different architecture to EVA.

It's too early to tell for 3PAR and HP StoreOnce are quite new.

Flipping the other side of the coin, EMC's Data Domain has gone from strength to strength, dominating the secondary deduplication market. Isilon, another gem, is leading the scale-out NAS market and there are no sore thumb like an iSCSI-only box like LeftHand.

The completeness of the story with EMC is there because every solution fits. If the customer is an SMB, the VNXe fits. The customer wants storage capacity savings, the Data Domain can be easily integrated and if they want NAS, EMC has VNX unified storage and if the customer is an HPC customer, Isilon comes into the picture. We have seen EMC's ability to integrate and fit their solutions together.

I don't see that with HP. Imagine how confused the customer can get. If the customer is an SMB, HP will probably want to sell them the expensive iSCSI-only LeftHand. If they want iSCSI and Fibre Channel, the customer has to forklift their solution to the EVA. If they want NAS, ooops, HP NAS sucks but if the customer has a bit more money, perhaps PolyServe and Ibrix can do (if only the customer has a few million ringgits to spare). StoreOnce, ooops, it's not in 3PAR yet and if the EVA customer wants storage tiering, they would have to forklift again to 3PAR.

This is what I mean. HP storage solution has no story to tell.

And don't get me started with HP Services in Malaysia.

To me, HP is just not the right storage right now. It's confusing; it's messy; it's just doesn't fit right now.