Justin Vashisht September 2, 2010 will go down as one of the most defining days in HP Storage history. On that day 3Par officially accepted HP’s bid to acquire them at $33 a share which forced Dell, who started the acquisition talks with an offer of $18 share to tap out. A few months later Dell would acquire Compellent. In the weeks that followed after the HP/3Par announcement critics across the internet began to question HP’s sanity for spending 2.35 billion dollars on a little known company from Fremont California with 300 employees. What was the value in 3Par and how on earth would HP make there money back? At first glance 3Par was just another storage company who’s product line seemingly overlapped HP’s. Well, it is said that Mark Hurd, HP’s former CEO was not very friendly when it came to R&D funding. 3Par had Thin Provisioning technology down cold and HP wanted it and wanted it immediately to get its claws into the exploding cloud market. At that time HP’s flagship SAN was the XP series, which was just a nice HP logo slapped on top of a Hitachi SAN. Below that was the HP EVA series which was not doing too well against EMC and Netapp. HP felt it needed to revamp its entire storage line and in the last few months it has already started paying off for HP. One has to think if HP even realized that success would come this quick. Let’s look at some of the recent highlights that have come from the HP/3Par relationship.
HP/3PAR IN THE GARTNER MAGIC QUADRANT
Gartner, which at the core is an information technology research and advisory firm is very well respected in the industry. Many senior IT leaders such as CIO/CTO’s rely on Gartner to help them make decisions on choosing the right vendors and products. Being able to quickly see who are the industry leaders and visionaries in a certain space saves valuable time that would otherwise be spent on researching each vendor. Investors can also use Gartner to help understand the market in a clear and compact way. Gartner’s claim to flame is the way it visually represents its analysis. Two methods are used, the "Hype Cycle" and "Magic Quadrant" charts. The Hype Cycle visually shows the maturity, adoption, and social application of the specific technology. The Magic Quadrant provides a visual qualitative analysis into a market and its direction, maturity and participants. In a Magic Quadrant report you can expect to see where a firm sits in regards to being a leader, challenger, visionary, or nice player. Here is a breakdown of each category you will see on the MQ diagram.
-Leaders score higher on both criteria; the ability to execute and completeness of vision. Typically larger industry developed businesses with vision and potential for expansion. -Challengers score higher the ability to execute and lower on the completeness of vision. Typically larger, settled businesses with minimal future plans for that industry. -Visionaries score lower on the ability to execute and higher on the completeness of vision. Typically smaller companies that are unloading their planned potential. -Niche players score lower on both criteria: the ability to execute and completeness of vision. Typically new additions to the Magic Quadrant, or market fledglings.
Now that you have a brief overview of the Gartner model let’s take a look at last year’s (2010) Magic Quadrant diagram for Midrange and High-End Modular Disk Arrays.
As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Here, we can see 3Par barely sitting the highest in the challengers galaxy. Looking at the X and Y axis label we can determine that 3Par sat pretty well especially when it came to there closet competitors. All in all not bad, especially considering the size and age of 3Par. Now, looking at HP we can see right away that even though HP is sitting in the leaders galaxy they are pretty low on the totem pole. Looking back at 2010 and seeing HP’s storage portfolio and slow innovations I have to say that Gartner’s positioning of them is spot on. It’s obvious that if HP were to go any higher in the leader board to overtake IBM, Dell, and Hitachi and to be on the heels of EMC and Netapp they either needed a huge acquisition or pump some mega cash into R&D and hope that it is successful. Well, we know that HP definitely did the big acquisition, well actually a few of them. Don’t forget Lefthand Networks and iBrix! HP also overhauled the existing portfolio with the new EVA 6000 lineup. The industry has reacted very feel to all this and new HP offerings and I feel HP now gets the respect in this space. So, what did Gartner think of all of these acquisitions and innovations?
HP is now sitting pretty above Dell, IBM, and Hitachi. They are now the leaders on the completeness and vision scale and are right below EMC and Netapp on the ability to execute. Think about how far Hp has come in less than a year. HP has just started to sink its teeth into 3Par technology and assimilate it. THe latest P10000 was already complete before HP took over. The next generation systems are in the works and have a much bigger team with much more talent in the pool. Don’t forget that David Scott who was 3Par’s CEO is now heading up HP storage. I predict HP will be at the heels or equal to Netapp and EMC on next years’ report.
Overall this is a huge win for HP. In my opinion they are now very well respected in the Medium-Enterprise & Cloud spaces and are being included in deals that never would have been possible in the past with the old lineup. This is totally awesome!
HP/3PAR SETS WORLD RECORD IOPS BENCHMARK WITH P10000
The P10000 v800 HP/3Par storage system recently got put through the ringers of the SPC Benchmark 1 (SPC-1). For those that don’t know PSC stands for the Storage Performance Council. The SPC is a vendor-neutral standards body focused on the storage industry. The goal of the SPC is to basically server as the catalyst for performance improvement in storage subsystems. The bottom line is the SPC provides benchmarks results that show the true speed of a storage system. Most vendors will only open up there systems to controlled environments where they can skew there numbers be submitting workloads that will take advantage of cache, etc. With the SPC-1 you let your storage system loose to the dogs and they will tell you where you really stand. The P10000 v800 was recently a participant in the SPC-1 benchmark. SPC-1 consists of a single workload designed to demonstrate the performance of a storage subsystem while performing the typical functions of business critical applications. Those applications are characterized by predominately random I/O operations and require both queries as well as update operations. Examples of those types of applications include online transaction processing OLTP, database operations, mail server implementations, server and desktop virtualization. The v800 came in at 450,212.66 IOPS with the closest disk array competitor being an IBM DS8700 at 380,489.30 IOPS! See the SPC-1 3Par results PDF here. For any enterprise that is looking for the ultimate array whether it be for cloud provider, email provider, or any heavy duty workload the P10000 is hands down the 800 pound gorilla!
HP has also claimed that since the acquisition they have double its base of 3Par customers. Revenue numbers for the storage division have grown and HP seems to have a clear strategy on here they want to go. Craig Nunes who is heading up the marketing is a fire of excitement and energy who shows his passion when he speaks about these systems. I got to see him and David Scott unveil the P10000 at VMWorld and they really fired up the crowd. 2012 will definitely be an interesting year for HP storage and I look forward to seeing HP continue to innovate and make EMC and Netapp sweat.
