Irreverence

posted on 29 May 2008 17:03

According to Neal Clapper, StorageWorks VP for EMEA at HP, the company sells more high-end Hitachi arrays, called XPs in HP-speak, than Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) and Sun. She thought it was posible that HP sold more of these storage arrays than HDS and Sun combined. There's a surprise.

Hitachi Ltd makes the arrays and has three main selling channels: HP; Sun; and HDS, which does not make these arrays; it merely sells them as Hitachi's direct selling organisation.

A follow-on from this is that, since Hitach and HDS have mentioned that solid state drive (SSD) support is coming in these arrays then it's logical to think that both HP and Sun will take them on board with their resold or OEM'd Hitachi high-end arrays.

Neal Clapper also suggested that HDS is struggling in the mid-range storage area because it is not allied to a strong server vendor. HP has its own strong server sales and: "EMC was very smart linking up with Dell."

^{[Chris Mellor.]}