UPDATED 12:03 EDT / DECEMBER 03 2012

HP’s Big Infrastructure Announcements at HP Discover Germany Software Defined Datacenter

HP LogoHP Storage team just introduced at their European HP Discover (#hpdiscover) event what they call as their biggest announcement ever. Here is our Breaking Analysis of their approach that we just posted.

HP announced the following new product and solutions.
HP 3PAR StoreServ 7000 Storage

Effortless Tier 1 Storage with Midrange Affordability

HP StoreAll Storage

Hyperscale object and file storage to tame and mine your content explosion

HP StoreOnce Backup

Fastest disk backup and recovery in the industry

Software Defined Opportunity For HP

David Scott, SVP of the Storage team former CEO of the successful 3PAR acquisition  said that HP’s storage will crush the competition.  David Scott said that HP is positioning their offerings as a staple in the software-defined datacenter market where their new offering will lead the software-defined storage product play.

HP’s execution of the 3Par acqusition is taking the high end technology and bringing it to the masses at the midrange and entry level both for the enterprise and cloud providers.  According to Dave Donatelli, HP EVP of the Enterprise Servers, Networking, and Storage division, this has been the plan from the beginning.

I went further to asked Dave Donatelli the next logical question.  How does the role of software play in his hardware business as it relates to the customer’s changing business model around software-led infrastructure and opportunity for HP to drive new margins.

Donatelli said “HP is positioned with shipping products in the fast growing software-define markets with software-defined networking, software-defined servers, and here with software-defined storage….this will help get customers an offering today that is relevant for the transformation of the datacenter and more importantly drive HP margin improvements across the board.”

Translation:  Software is the key to value for customers and margin expansion for HP’s overall business.  Something that has been confusing to Wall Street over the past few years.  These comments from Donatelli shall certainly shed some light to where he’s headed.

It’s Software NOT Hardware

At SiliconANGLE we’ve been tracking this new emerging mega-trend of “software-define datacenter’.  It is clear from all the market data that customers and suppliers business models, and value creation for information technology environments for providers of information technology products and services will be centered around “Software” NOT “Hardware”.

More importantly for HP, margin expansion (aka profit) will come from software.  It is the role of the software working with the ever expanding hardware capabilities with software  providing that “high octane” performance.

Wikibon research team just released new ground breaking research around what we are calling Software-led Infrastructure.

Software-led Infrastructure research link:  http://wikibon.org/wiki/v/Defining_Software-led_Infrastructure

Software Defined Infrastructure

It will be software defined infrastructure or as Wikibon.org has recently release in their latest research report – Software-led Infrastructure (see link above) that will transform the enterprise.  This new direction in the market ties nicely with the massively growing big data market.

The combination of software defined infrastructure and big data will drive a mega shift to a modern datacenter and by result the new modern business.  My prediction is that this will be the biggest shift in the enterprise market since the computing and networking explosion in the late 80s and early 90s.

Enterprise Market Shift – A Boom Ahead

At the core of this change is a shift to increasingly software-centric IT operations with the virtualization of the majority of hardware devices across the IT value chain. Pervasive virtualization across compute, storage, and networking technologies means that the point of control for the datacenter will exist in software, not hardware components.

Here is the Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante of Wikibon explaining the big move by HP with the slew of announcments today.

Polymorphic Simplicity

David Scott highlighted the big announcement by calling this new approach as Polymorphic Simplicity.  Instantly this meme was critized on Twitter by many.  Although a great way to put a concept around the new storage mojo by HP, I don’t think Polymorphic Simplicity has legs as a marketing angle.  It’s just too complex to explain especially for sales people.

HP might just have lightning in a bottle with the software-defined mega trend with shipping product in all three infrastructure areas:  software-led networking, software-defined servers, and now software-defined storage.

From a marketing perspective I think that it’s a no brainer to just go with software defined datacenter as their marketing angle – riding the fact that they are the only vendor delivering all three software-defined datacenter products .  Or as we say software-led infrastructure.

The crowd agrees with me.  Here is a tweet that summarizes what we are seeing.

@sonoble comments on Twitter

I am impressed with how agile HP is being in the SDN/SDCC market.  They are involved in Network Feature Virtualization both from their hardware and networking sides which is a great move and shows good foresight.  With the new storage products and the current blade products they are well positioned to take advantage of opportunities.

For more information on the mega-trend software defined infrastructure keep following SiliconANGLE and Wikibon for all the lastest recent reporting and free research.

Software-led Infrastructure research link:  http://wikibon.org/wiki/v/Defining_Software-led_Infrastructure


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