-by Pete Brey

In last week’s blog, you heard from our Chief Technologist on the HP Highly Scalable NAS team. I work closely with Michael and am the World Wide Marketing Manager for our recently announced Extreme Data Storage product. When I joined HP’s Network Attached Storage group several years ago, I was responsible for bringing to market HP’s Enterprise File Services product line which is based upon the PolyServe scalable file system. In the time since we brought those products to market, we have experienced incredible success growing that business by rolling up our sleeves and helping customers build their next generation file serving environments. To be certain, our new Scalable NAS products are deployed in a wide array of customer scenarios – some small, and some very mind-bogglingly large. We’ve been working on perfecting our product for years and ExDS is a culmination of our experience serving the large end of the NAS market.

When you step back and you look at what the industry players are saying about this space – whether they call it Cloud Storage, Clustered Storage, or what have you – there are a few things we at HP think are going to drive the overall direction of the market. First and foremost, these environments are very complex and people are fundamentally looking for simpler and better approaches. At HP, we’ve had many years of experience working closely with these types of customers to build these kinds of solutions. We know the fundamental components inside and out – the scalable file system, the hardware to run it on, and the storage to house the content. From our continued investments in PolyServe to our industry-leading BladeSystem to some cool new storage technology we’ve developed in-house, we are innovating and we will deliver a complete “baked” end-to-end solution. So while some are approaching this market as a “science project” with cobbled-together software and hardware, HP will be harnessing all of the knowledge and power of its portfolio to deliver what customers are demanding. Others are approaching this market with proprietary close-ended solutions, which we also think is the wrong long-term approach because it locks customers in with few long-term options and fundamentally higher cost structures. HP’s Extreme Data Storage System encompasses our vision that customers should demand these types of systems be industry standard and open.

But don’t take my word for it – here is what others are saying about HP’s approach:

http://www.echannelline.com/usa/story.cfm?item=23254

And here are some other recent industry articles:

http://storage.blogs.techtarget.com/2008/05/20/the-maui-mystery/

http://storagemojo.com/2008/05/19/wheres-maui/