To say HP was active during their HP Discover 2012 event in Las Vegas this week is a bit of an understatement. The event was very much storage-focused, HP touted a range of new hardware, services and software ranging from StoreOnce data backup and deduplication to specialized cloud solution for airlines. There was a core message evident throughout however – from the press conferences to Meg Whitman’s keynote – HP has lost storage system market share over the last few years to EMC and NetApp and they want it back. Now! HP was full of swagger and wasn’t shy about their frontal assault on EMC. Given what we saw this week, HP’s right not to be shy.
To say HP was active during their HP Discover 2012 event in Las Vegas this week is a bit of an understatement. The event was very much storage-focused, HP touted a range of new hardware, services and software ranging from StoreOnce data backup and deduplication to specialized cloud solution for airlines. There was a core message evident throughout however – from the press conferences to Meg Whitman’s keynote – HP has lost storage system market share over the last few years to EMC and NetApp and they want it back. Now! HP was full of swagger and wasn’t shy about their frontal assault on EMC. Given what we saw this week, HP’s right not to be shy.
The event tagline "Make it matter." was effective by eliciting an emotional response to HP’s message. The idea is not only that HP’s products "matter" but the focus was on the results at the end, less on the particular solution. Meg Whitman started off her Day 2 keynote talking about how HP employees have volunteered to work on-site with active military personnel to make sure their communications and other critical tech components were always available. She also talked at length about HP team members on the ground at recent catastrophes like Thailand’s flood.
Taking a step back, Day 1 was highlighted by three core announcements:
- HP Catalyst Software for StoreOnce Backup Offers Improved Speed and Efficiency
- HP BladeSystem and Virtual Connect Flat SAN Technology Reduces Multi-tier Complexity
- HP Announces Data Protector 7 for Unified Enterprise Information Protection
StoreOnce is definitely the key news – the B6200 system can back up 100TB/hour, which is 3 times faster than EMC’s new DD990 with Boost, which was announced two weeks prior. Of course EMC is quick to point out that HP’s system has more nodes and so on, but ultimately the number of nodes and quite frankly spec sheet speeds and feeds aren’t going to matter as much. It comes down to effectiveness, usability and speed of backup and recovery, all points where HP feels they have a significant advantage.
Of course there’s quite a bit of integration between HP’s hardware and the software solutions as well, perhaps none of which is quite as exciting across both IT and marketing than what’s going on with the Autonomy group and IDOL. HP is allowing unprecedented access and more importantly, analytics, to companies who want to not just aggregate customer input, but act on it. With the new services a company can pull together data points across platforms like Twitter and Facebook, merging that with company contact emails, customer surveys and so on, to get an increasingly detailed picture of their customers and what those customers want. Of course there’s a tremendous legal opportunity too, not just within compliance, but also in terms of preemptively finding and responding to potential issues.
There were many other event highlights, check out the StorageReview.com Twitter feed for expo updates from Fusion-io, Hitachi GST, SanDisk and many others, along with several other interesting bits like:
- HP’s Gen2 Fusion-io ioMemory product
- Big Data Optimizations for Hadoop (800 node deployment in under 30 minutes)
- Every cell phone call has 212 data points that get collected
- HP CloudSystem added support for EC2 and HP Public Cloud
