Today Hewlett-Packard announced that New York-based full-service securities firm Samuel A. Ramirez & Co., has chosen replace its aging IT infrastructure and deploy HP 3PAR Utility Storage. The firm, which reportedly manages more than $2 billion in customer assets, aims to improve customer responsiveness timing-wise, as well as to lower costs.

“Due to its aging storage infrastructure, the firm continuously encountered access issues when searching the database on its storage area network (SAN). This resulted in delays of several minutes, which can lead to lost revenue in the securities business.

Working with HP partner ESI, Samuel A. Ramirez & Co. chose HP 3PAR Utility Storage, a virtualized, multitenant disk array, to replace its inefficient SAN.”

The firm’s infrastructure now includes HP 3PAR F400 Storage System, HP 3PAR Remote Copy and HP 3PAR Virtual Copy Software. This has improved network performance by a factor of 24, lowers costs and reduces the firm’ data center footprint, according to HP. Further, a release stated that “storage administration tasks and manual data backup activities required up to four hours a day to complete,” with Ramirez & Co.’s legacy storage infrastructure.

The “new” Hewlett-Packard under chief executive Leo Apotheker is branching out beyond the relatively low-margin hardware market, and yet another one of the fields the company is aiming for IT consulting. The company recently rolled out the Strategic IT Advisory Services suite designed for its highest-paying clientèle. This initiative has been in the making for several months now, and represents another milestone in HP’s accelerating efforts in the managed cloud space.

There are a number of drivers behind the new HP, as well as behind its first quarter revenues. The company reported revenue of $32.3 billion for Q1, 2011 – a 4 percent increase year-over-year. This figure however is slightly below Wall Street’s expectations of $32.75 billion to $33.59 billion. Nevertheless, HP did report a 26 percent leap in profits at $1.17 per share.