HP's acquisition of high-end storage provider 3Par is part of the tech giant's strategy to drive storage virtualisation into the global enterprise market.
This is according to Tumi Pooe, sales and business unit manager, HP Storage Works Division.
Two months ago, HP won a $2.35 billion bidding war of 3Par against its rival Dell. HP purchased the global provider of high-end storage, through a cash tender offer of $33 per share.
Earlier this year, 3Par terminated its merger agreement with Dell and paid Dell the $72 million termination fee required to terminate the merger agreement.
According to HP, the tech giant is in the process of integrating 3Par's utility storage products with HP's existing storage solutions.
Smart storage
Pooe says 3Par is a good fit for the South African market, as many local medium and large enterprises have begun making hardware lifecycle refreshes and are looking to consolidate their data centres.
“One of the biggest storage challenges today is that companies demand more capacity and tend to buy more storage arrays and applications, however, by doing this, they create more silos, which increase the complexity of managing the data,” notes Pooe.
He believes the answer lies in storage virtualisation and thin provisioning. He says data growth, skills shortage and constrained budgets are forcing enterprises to think differently about how they invest in storage systems.
“We are faced with a 70% exponential increase of data growth every 18 months, and the HP acquisition of 3Par is enabling us to reduce storage complexity by using thin provisioning.”
Pooe points out that the acquisition has strengthened HP's position in the global storage market. He says 3Par, which has 600 employees, had the technology but did not have the financial backing to expand.
He says 3Par will accelerate HP's converged infrastructure strategy by driving growth in the virtual data centre and cloud computing markets.
“In SA, we have large financial houses, the big telcos as well as other industry verticals that have shown interest in investing in 3Par's technology,” Pooe notes.
Skills shortage
According to HP, 3Par utility storage through thin provisioning enables organisations to purchase up to 75% less capacity, meaning less equipment to house, less cooling and power requirements and a reduction in carbon footprint. In addition, storage total cost of ownership is reduced by 50%.
Craig Paul, business development manager, HP Storage Works Division, says 3Par technology also addresses the South African skills shortage problem. “The technology can provide automated storage services that are easily managed without having highly-skilled system administrators looking after it.”
3Par uses automatic storage tiering that moves the workload to solid state drives during a busy period, without any downtime, Paul notes, and when the high performance is no longer required, it automatically transfers the workload back to a lower fibre channel.
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