New HP Storage Boss Promises Data Liposuction

Hewlett-Packard has appointed David Scott, CEO of 3Par, to head its storage business, and he has promised to offer customers “storage liposuction”.

3Par’s virtualised storage architecture made it the subject of a fierce bidding war earlier this year, in which HP eventualy triumphed over Dell. This technology is now key to HP’s pitch to service providers, said HP vice president Dave Donatelli.

Get storage off life support

Over-provisioning and inflexibility are besetting problems of older storage architectures, said Scott (left), who presented a lively bunch of metaphors for the way 3Par handles data at a press event in Barcelona.

Storage has a weight problem, he said, and “we want to perform storage liposuction” – sucking out extra storage by allowing thin provisioning, so utilisation can go up from 20 percent to 80 percent.

Older storage architectures are “like performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation” on storage devices. It is a very hands-on process, said Scott. When other vendors try to automate this, it is “like moving from manual CPR to a life support system.”

This kind of automation adds breathing tubes and machinery, and needs a nurse, and the patient is not agile, said Scott. By contrast, 3Par’s technology is “autonomic” like a nervous system, which allows the storage to move and change quickly. “If I run to the beach my heart rate goes up,” said Scott, adding that storage systems should be able to respond to new demands in a like manner.

Growing market share

Although HP is a storage leader, it has only 11 percent of the market, said Donatelli. “3Par will enable us to go after the other 89 percent.”

“3Par is a storage product for the next ten years,” said Donatelli,

Scott worked for HP for 17 years before leaving to found 3Par, so he says “I have worked for 27 years at HP, but for ten years I didn’t know it”

“Key to our business is thin provisioning and high availability, said 3Par customer Simon Hanford of UK service provider Attenda. “We don’t have the joy of taking down parts of our infrastructure for maintenance.”