The e-business framework of tomorrow`s companies has forced IT vendors to rethink their sales strategies. One of the most successful new methodologies so far has been the direct model, which has taken the likes of Dell and Gateway directly to the customer - and to the top of the PC sales pile.
Hewlett-Packard looks set to take the concept one step further with its Instant Capacity on Demand (iCOD) product offering. The concept is perfect for ISPs and ASPs that occasionally need to deal with peek usage, but generally use significantly less drive and processor capacity.
Last year, HP released a line of its HP 9000 enterprise Unix servers with more processors than immediately required, allowing customers to enable and pay for them when needed. Now it has come to market with a similar storage offering.
iCOD for storage will typically ship with an extra 20% of disk space, which once again only comes online when the customer requires it. The customer pays when he starts to use each disk.
The box behind the offering is the HP SureStore E XP256 - care of Hitachi. HP says that it dropped its previous high-end storage partner, EMC, due to a closed SAN offering and a roadmap that required too many box swaps.
"The XP256 framework is modular," says Fred Huang, storage research director, HP R&D division. "It can scale from 60GB to 12TB." More importantly, he says, is the compatibility between different generations of the product, allowing scalability of up to 100TB without a box swap.
"ASPs and ISPs are pushing the envelope by taking these offerings to the middle-tier," says Huang.
Other features include multi-OS support - making the XP256 a good option for an open SAN architecture - as well as asynchronous communication between the boxes, increasing data transfer distances dramatically, according to HP.
The next-generation XP256 Future will be a field upgrade, and offer a 6.5Gbps back plane and up to 42TB capacity. HP hopes to grow its storage business at 100% annually in both sales and revenue, and has already moved more than five of the high-end boxes locally.
The storage offering is part of HP`s e-Services drive, which it hopes will control customers` transactional processes end-to-end. HP insists that e-Services is a framework of how to get to e-business rather than a product offering, and the high-end storage slots into the data centre component.
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