The IT atmosphere is cloudy.  And indications are all pointing to trends that will yield more success for cloud storage and virtualization in the coming years.  This perhaps has pushed enterprises to tweak their business models according to what the game dictates. Even giants like Hewlett-Packard are dancing to this tune.  The world’s largest computer manufacturing company is now considering a spin-off for its PC arm and halted shipping of devices powered by webOS—a move that gave experts the impression that HP will soon be selling the operating system’s developer, Palm. Although this announcement spelled slower growth for the organization, HP is not yet ready to bid reign goodbye. Instead, they are pounding more on the future of the cloud, with back-to-back launches of new storage technologies: HP Peer Motion and HP P10000 3PAR Storage Systems.

Senior Vice President and GM of Storage at HP, David Scott identifies key features of new storage portfolio, and how these will support the tech community’s exodus to cloud.

“Legacy storage systems architected 20 years ago were never designed for the dynamic IT-as-a-Service world, forcing organizations to use expensive and inefficient bolt-on virtualization approaches,” he says.

“The true peer-based storage federation in HP Converged Storage solutions can handle the inherent unpredictability of always-on, multitenant environments while reducing expense, management overhead and risk to service levels.”

HP Peer Motion will be made available for HP LeftHand and HP 3PAR Storage System—a feat that will pioneer peer-to-peer storage federation capabilities.  Wikibon’s seasoned analyst David Floyer sees two outstanding benefits of this federated storage technology: a reduction in cost, and complexity of array migrations.  HP’s extension of converged storage leadership is expected to deliver the following:

• Agility to deal with unpredictable demands: the array will ensure perpetual productivity, ROI augmentation and improve efficiency by way of capabilities that span from a virtual storage area network or SAN appliance to mid-range and high-end storage systems.

• Simplified management without sacrificing performance: the system will guarantee instantaneous support to mixed, unpredictable and multitenant workloads on a single high-performance selection.

• Efficiency to meet the demands of explosive data growth: will leverage existing capacity and will help avoid purchase of surplus disk space.

HP has been quite busy occupying the headlines, especially after the revelation of its bland Q3 revenue results during last week’s earnings call.  The company announced new pricing for the HP TouchPad, a move that’s revived shares a bit, as well as their plans on releasing their own smartphone and future patent buys.  Developments within HP’s packet are inevitable, especially when the company is trying to rebuild itself in the eyes of their investors, who have started to lose interest in their products and services.

This so-called storage federation will have the ability to eliminate the extra layer of virtualization appliances that will drive even lower three business dimensions: cost, administration overhead and service-level risk within the data center architecture.

It’s an important path for HP to take, and it’s one that was set in motion last year.  It’s only recent weeks that have yielded more drastic measures from the HP camp as it comes down to execution time.  Implementing its earlier goals around storage and cloud services is a forward-thinking shift for such a large company, and it comes at a heavy price.  But it’s an important revolution for HP moving forward, and speaks on the company’s pro-active nature in this newfound arena.