HP StorageWorks Tech Day: Day 0

Here I am sitting in the airport waiting for my flight to Houston, which apparently is severely overbooked.  I guess the airlines are profiting from the BA cabin crew strike and filling their planes to capacity.  There are a lot of BA aircraft on the ground at Heathrow this morning, so clearly the strike is having some kind of impact.

Anyway, enough of that; we’re here to talk about HP StorageWorks Tech Day, an event focusing specifically on storage products.  For me it follows quickly on from HP Blades Day, which was literally only a few weeks ago.  I’m looking forward to this event as it’s purely storage focused and I know there should be some interesting things on the horizon.

What we will have to wait to find out is whether HP are able to talk about futures.  Here are a some things I’d like to know about.

• Replacement for the XP24000. Hu Yoshida let the cat out of the bag with a post earlier this year (which I believe was quickly withdrawn or amended).  As HDS and HP share the same hardware base for their enterprise-class arrays, we can expect to see a new piece of kit appear on HPs inventory by 3Q2010.  But what will it look like?  There are two choices; stay with the monolithic architecture or follow the market and go with an Intel/commodity-based design.  I expect it will be the latter and (although not an HP specific issue) it will be interesting to see how Hu reconciles his messages of the last 2 years extolling the virtues of monolithic design if Hitachi move away from it.
• Replacement for the EVA. Although it has been incrementally upgraded, the EVA is in need of a serious revamp.  Does the product have a future with all the acquisitions that have taken place over the last couple of years or will EVA be gently retired?
• Unified Storage. The exisitng HP range is divided into “P” devices for SAN and “X” devices for NAS.  I’m not sure of the efficacy of the nomenclature there, but there are two distinct product lines.  Will HP continue to retain the segmented products or will we see a move to unified storage?

Whatever we learn over the next two days, you can be sure it will be fast-moving, well executed and highly enjoyable.  The odd scoop or two wouldn’t go amiss to!

You can find details of attendees and the agenda over at Calvin Zito’s blog site, which will save me reproducing it here.

Calvin’s HP StorageWorks Day Post

The Twitter hashtag for the event is #hpstorageday

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