HP Storage Tech Day

In a few weeks I will be attending the HP Storage Tech Day in Houston, TX. Thanks to Calvin Zito (@HPStorageGuy / http://www.hp.com/storage/blog) for the invite.

This is a follow on from the one held last year and sits alongside the HP Infrastructure Software and Blade Day which occurred last month. The first event was the imputes for the Gestalt IT Tech Field Days.

The agenda has not been finalised but here is what is currently proposed.

Topics such as:

• HP Converged Infrastructure, and how HP StorageWorks fits into it
• Updates on HP’s storage platforms, and
• How HP is competing with the other major storage vendors

You will hear from HP executives such as Paul Perez – VP and Chief Technologist of HP StorageWorks, Andrew Manners - StorageWorks Marketing VP, and several other key executives. You’ll also see demos of specific HP StorageWorks products as well as have a chance to tour some of the HP StorageWorks facilities.

I have done a bit with HP EVA's in the past and always liked aspects of their technology.

There has been so much going on in the storage world in the last year but I have not heard a lot form HP on storage. The biggest news was David Donatelli moving over from EMC and the subsequent law suit. We have had the rise of VCE and Acadia, Netapp have produced their Secure Multi-Tennant Cloud architecture. On the blade front we have HP bashing heads with Cisco around UCS, after all the now infamous Tolly report came out at the Blade Day.

So whats the strategy ongoing strategy for storage at HP? They went and picked up LeftHand, they picket up Donatelli. At the high end HP they have XP which is OEM'd from Hitachi and we have just seen Oracle drop Hitachi in preference for their new step-child Sun.

I am sure there will be lots of technical speed and feeds which I look forward to, but here are some of the high level questions I hope I can get a feel for as well. If I am thinking about these things then I am sure Enterprise customers are thinking about these as well.

• Where does the product line sit? The products from Lefthand are great, I think they may have been the first cab off the rank with a VSA. So whats its future and what do we compare it with. Is it the HP competitor to Dell EqualLogic? EVA and XP, where are things at?
• What about automated storage Tiering, at the sub-LUN level. We know EMC are talking up FAST2, 3PAR are releasing it and Compellent have had it for a while. Whats HP's thoughts on these areas.
• Stack integrations looks to be the flavour of the month, EMC (with Cisco and VMware) as well as Netapp are pushing it hard. So what is HP's take on integrating their own stacks with blades, Procurve/3Com and Storage.
• Cloud. If there was another flavour of the month its Cloud. What are HP's thoughts around storage for Cloud, either internal or service provider.

It all starts on Monday the 29th of March. I will be using Twitter and some blog posts to share my thoughts. I am sure there will be many more questions that will come to the surface before then but if you have any particular thing you would like to grill HP about their storage then post in the comments or DM on twitter (@rodos).

Should be some real geek fun.

Rodos

P.S. For the long disclaimer bit. HP will be paying my travel and accommodation expenses for this event. I can and will write what I feel like, good or bad for HP. In my day job I work for a company that is a Partner of just about every vendor. We have a awesome HP BPSA on staff (Rodos waves at Jakes), plus we are a HDS and Netapp partner. We resell UCS and I am bit of a UCS fanboy. It is what it is, this is my personal blog. Wearing two hats keeps my head warm in winter.