The continuation of Wikibon’s Storage Wars series (see here for Part 1 and Part 2) looks into how Hewlett-Packard managed to integrate 3PAR into the company in relation to today’s storage market. Overall, they’ve done a pretty good job.

Wikibon covered six areas where it’s essential for HP to invest in to maintain its current position as a complete storage array provider.

The first area is flash. Hewlett-Packard needs to go beyond SSDs; a goal it has partially achieved with the implementation of flash cache across its portfolio, though the company still needs to expand here. Services is another area where it needs to evolve its stand with 3PAR:

“Significant investment in services to deliver the high-availability and performance capabilities of 3PAR, with a strong link back to development to ensure that storage functionality is enhanced.”

This is still a work in progress and will take time to evolve. The cross-technology high-availability services should be both internally delivered and delivered by the HP channel.”

Wikibon believes that HP has done a much better job when it comes to adapting its storage tech for the different workloads that enterprises are handling these days, centering on BI, and the same can be said of the federation capabilities it has made available with its offerings.  Peer Motion and other software facilitated that.

The fifth category via which the HP-3PAR integration was assessed is system virtualization, mainly the multiple hypervisor support the company offers. This is essential in several regards including when it comes to backup, where the manufacturer has also made progress recently.

Earlier this month the first StorOnce products were announced at HP Discover: a deduplication technology developed by HP Labs. This also significant because it qualifies as “aggressive implementation of new functionality;” the last investment category Wikibon highlighted.