As It Melds Compaq, HP Shapes Storage Mission

To do it, HP, with its fresh stable of storage products culled from its acquisition of Compaq Computer Corp., is pushing one-stop shopping and readying enhancements to its storage systems.

Unlike pure storage providers, HP can offer customers storage plus other crucial parts of their infrastructure, said Howard Elias, vice president and general manager of Network Storage Solutions for HP, in an interview last week from his Houston office.

"Its becoming a more strategic decision for customers," Elias said of enterprise storage issues. "Were not just out there hawking disk arrays or just saying, Please buy more software because hardwares becoming lower margins."

On the product front, HP will focus on software improvements, off-platform sales and converged technology after fully absorbing Compaq, he said.

The majority of HPs new storage products come from Compaq—as did Elias—where the companys products led in Windows-attached storage, modular storage as well as midsize business storage market share.

On the other hand, EMC, of Hopkinton, Mass., is the high-end leader in SANs (storage area networks), enterprise network-attached storage and high-end arrays.

On the software side, HP, of Palo Alto, Calif., is planning improvements to its recently released OpenView SAM (Storage Area Manager) product, Elias said, declining to elaborate. The product already has features for resource management and data replication.

HP plans to begin selling off- platform storage more aggressively, Elias added. The company plans to sell storage for IBMs AIX platforms, as well as Sun Microsystems Inc.s Solaris platforms, he said.