HP extended the range of its storage products into the mid-market with a series of product announcements at HP Discover in Frankfurt which it claims will open up significant opportunities for channel partners.
Outlining an over-arching strategy of ‘polymorphic simplicity’, the vendor claimed it could help customers escape the fragmented architectures and complex environments provided by its Tier 1 rivals with a single architecture that encompasses primary storage, data retention and data protection.
The strategy would enable businesses to achieve three aims: return on information, return on infrastructure and return on individuals.
The vendor said the introduction of its HP 3PAR StoreServ 7000 which "delivers Tier 1 storage for less than €30,000" had opened up the mid-market for channel partners and extended the target addressable market into a new 11bn market, "obliterating the traditional barriers between high end storage and mid-range".
David Scott, senior vice president and general manager for HP storage claimed it could also reduce customers’ management overhead by 90% and their capacity requirement by 50% by performing "a storage liposuction".
HP also announced HP StoreOnce 2000 and 4000 Backup that it suggested could perform backup operations three times faster than the closest competitive system and at a 35% lower cost.
HP EMEA storage lead for the channel, Gerhard Keller, said the announcements opened up a big opportunity for channel partners to promote HP into the mid-market space. While the vendor had 50% of the server market, it had only 15% of the storage market, presenting partners with strong cross-selling opportunities.
HP also argued the ability to deliver a single architecture would make it easier for partners by reducing the amount of training, sales and support resource they would need to put in place to sell and support many different architectures and solutions.
Keller said the vendor had already trained more than 4,000 individuals in 1,500 EMEA partners in the run up to the announcement of the new strategy.
He claimed HP had delivered the "whole tool set that a partner needs to solve the storage problems of its customers".
HP has also put a dealer registration programme in place to reward and compensate those that register new deals and protect margins.
HP also unveiled a scalable platform for object and file data access, known as HP StoreAll, which it claims provides a simplified environment for big data retention and cloud storage, along with Express Query, which integrates a NoSQL database and scan files 100,000 times faster than existing file system search methods.
Billy MacInnes
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