'The widest storage portfolio on the planet'

With a new thrust and a merger-boosted product range including its reinvented
OpenView, HP is warming up in this high-growth segment 

Twelve petabytes. That's how much information homo sapiens has created since
the beginning of time, according to an estimate. So what's a petabyte anyway? A
million terabytes (TB), or a billion gigabytes.

The digital world's share of that is small. But it's rapidly growing,
especially in the consolidated enterprise data center.

Post-merger HP says it's now deploying nine TB a month of storage globally.
Its enterprise arrays alone have over a petabyte of installed capacity so far.

Speaking at its ENSA (Enterprise Network Storage Architecture) Asia-Pacific
conference in Singapore, Neal Clapper, VP (Online Storage), HP, said that
storage was no longer a peripheral. "It has moved to central status, while
servers are often becoming peripheral!" She and other HP executives
described the HP's view of storage as heading toward a utility service in the
enterprise. 

Big bucks from storage

With terabytes deployed daily around the world, storage now accounts for 60
percent of global IT budgets, the biggest area of IT spend in large to mid-size
enterprises today. And it's also their big infrastructure management challenge.
For instance, the shift from nine-to-five banking to 24x7, anytime, anywhere,
has meant huge storage deployment. Citibank alone has deployed over 75 TB over
the past few years. Global corporate storage needs are doubling each year, and
storage was the only real post 9/11 IT growth area.

That's why storage is also the biggest ray of hope for the revenue--and
margin--starved IT industry, especially systems vendors. It's growing, has
relatively high product margins, and includes services revenues. No wonder all
of them, including IBM, Sun and HP, are so active here. This is apart from the
big pure-storage names--equipment vendors like Hitachi and StorageTek, and other
solutions and software players like EMC and Veritas Software.

HP was a low-profile player in this area in the 1990s, largely through its
tape backup products and disk arrays that have shipped with HP servers for well
over a decade. More recently, it ramped up its enterprise arrays and
virtualization products. Post 1990s, a big step was the re-orienting of its
popular OpenView network management software toward storage management.
OpenView's storage area manager (SAM) now includes capabilities of discovery,
assignment and access control, performance and capacity analysis, service levels
and metering/charge-back, replication (for remote mirroring), data protection
and media management.

HP's enterprise storage solutions tended to focus on the higher-capacity
data-center needs. Now, the merger with Compaq brings in a wide range of storage
solutions, giving it an end-to-end range. 

Managing those terabytes

As businesses are rapidly deploying more storage, its management, and
integration with legacy systems, is becoming increasingly difficult. Storage
management, therefore, is a big new mantra at HP Storage, and in the industry.
For instance, the $ 1.5 billion Veritas has seen rapid growth and profits just
from its storage management software. OpenView's new direction gives HP's
Storage group (part of the enterprise sales group in the new HP) an easier entry
into the many enterprises which already deploy OpenView for network management.

"It's all about storage management," said Clapper. "The secret
ingredient in storage is storage management. We're building storage intelligence
into our devices, into the fabric."

Big drivers in storage include consolidation and disaster management/business
continuity on the enterprise side, and the commercialization of the Internet,
and e-mail growth, overall. As enterprises move away from direct-attached
storage towards consolidated storage, network-attached storage and storage area
networks will be where all the growth is, as enterprise-wide management of
storage becomes a critical need. Direct-attached storage is difficult to manage
across a complex network. 

Putting it all together

These trends do vary by geography. In India, for instance, direct-attached
storage still dominates over 85 percent of large enterprises, according to
surveys by Dataquest in India. Storage area networks and consolidation have made
very slow inroads, thanks to infrastructure issues, primarily the lack of cheap,
high-availability bandwidth across the country, as well as the funds squeeze in
India over the past year when SAN really grew worldwide. This should change in
late 2003, as the new, private intercity fiber networks light up, offering
cheaper bandwidth, and enterprises deploy data and voice applications across
them in India.

But consolidation and virtualization (utilizing space seamlessly across
multiple servers and locations) are inevitable, especially as enterprises
realize that management headaches apart, enterprises realize that half their
storage is often not utilized.

And the unorganized nature of storage so far has meant complex networks with
different systems and software, within the same enterprise. This has required
partnerships for all storage players. HP, for instance, partners with not just
the major pure-storage players like Legato, Veritas and EMC or application
companies like Microsoft, SAP and PeopleSoft, but also systems competitors Sun,
IBM, Dell etc. Clapper said that because of these partnerships and by deploying
open standards "we can now manage over 70 percent of the storage on the
planet". Despite this agnostic approach and apparent partnership and
bonhomie, expect to see some big wars ahead for a slice of the pie that's
expected to grow into a $ 100 billion industry in 2005.

Prasanto K Roy 

(CNS)