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3PAR CEO to run HP StorageWorks

Roadmap changes afoot?

It's not quite out with the old and in with the new, but it is pretty close. David Scott, outgoing CEO of acquired 3PAR, is to run HP's entire StorageWorks business.

Scott becomes an SVP and general manager, and reports to HP Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking head David Donatelli.

Yesterday, in an HP announcement event in Barcelona, Tom Joyce, the marketing, strategy and operations VP for StorageWorks, said: "(3PAR InServ) is the architecture for the next decade," signalling that in the HP mid-range-enterprise storage product space, 3PAR is now pre-eminent. Scott's elevation puts the seal on that statement.

HP's storage product strategy has changed this year. The focus is on three main product areas: P4000 iSCSI SAN (storage area network), X9000 scalable NAS (network-attached storage) and 3PAR. The XP/P9500 and EVA product ranges will be enhanced and developed but the long-term future in the mid-range to enterprise block-access storage space is 3PAR.

Scott's quote in the release announcing his appointment was telling: "To help clients address the top storage challenges today, HP has made some key product introductions this year such as P4000 SAN for virtualised environments, StoreOnce for enterprise-wide deduplication, and the X9000 for scalable network-attached storage. Now, with 3PAR's lineup, HP has significantly enhanced its intellectual property in storage ..."

Notice the missing elephant in this quote? There is no mention of the P9500.

EVA and the XP/P9000 product ranges are now supporting players in StorageWorks. That absolutely does not mean that they are short-term products though. The P9000 family will be developed over-time and will do things that the 3PAR products don't support such as mainframe attach. There are two more EVA generations to come if certain HP sources are correct.

But the 3PAR architecture can be, and probably will be, pushed up-scale and down-scale, overlapping the mid-range EVA's capabilities more and more. The cloud and service provider markets are now much more open to HP with 3PAR; formerly, with EVA, it was becoming a near no-go area.

We were assured that the 3PAR products would not support mainframe attach, giving a long-term role to the XP/P9000 line. There was no equivalent niche identified for the EVA though. We might see an importation of the EVA software environment onto the 3PAR platform, giving it an EVA personality.  This is speculation by El Reg. ®

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