Hewlett-Packard is using a classic price/performance play to undercut the
competition in the storage hardware space: Selling a machine with
enterprise-level functionality at an entry-level price.
The systems vendor hopes its new StorageWorks XP10000 Disk Array pays off as part of a
strategy to make customers feel like they are getting a bargain by selling
them a system at a less expensive rate than competing products with similar
degrees of functionality.
HP can use the offering as a gesture of good faith after customers revolted
against the company’s products this time last year, causing HP’s storage
sales to plummet 15 percent.
Targeted for midrange to high-end businesses, the XP10000 is essentially the
Palo Alto, Calif., company’s higher-end XP12000 in terms of functionality,
said James Wilson, XP product manager, HP’s StorageWorks division.
The XP10000 disk array is designed to provide key features a larger business
needs to stay up and running and competitive. Perks include business
continuity tools for zero downtime, such as remote replication and disaster
recovery solutions.
New virtualization technology in XP10000 lets customers deploy tiered
storage applications, such as storage management software or e-mail
archiving software, with flexible partitioning to allow them to be altered
or provisioned in real time.
But whereas the XP12000 typically scales from 20 to over 300 terabytes and
costs from $300,000 to $3 million, Wilson said HP expects to five to 15
terabytes of storage on the XP10000, beginning at $200,000.
The idea is to give large companies that may have stringent budgets a shot
at affording machines with enough firepower to handle their data storage
needs. Wilson said the move will also help HP stack up against Hitachi Data
Systems, EMC and IBM, all of whom have similar offerings.
Putting pressure on rivals through attractive price/performance ratios is
nothing new. IBM, Sun and Dell executes similar moves in their server
businesses.
But HP has shown signs of late that it is willing to drastically cut the
starting costs of its storage gear. Last month, the company cut the
starter costs for its Scalable File Share 2.0 system in half in order to help smaller
enterprises afford large-scale file sharing utilities.
True to that form, the new XP10000 offering builds on the shift in HP’s
strategy to get back into contention in the storage gear race.
Customers can scale the XP 10000 from five to 240 disks, with 48 host ports
empowering 69 terabytes
device support enables tiered storage environments that support up to 16
petabytes of total capacity.
The array supports the HP-UX, Windows, Linux, OpenVMS, NonStop, Mainframe,
Tru64, AIX and Solaris operating systems.