Enterprises are looking for better returns on IT investments, including dramatically increasing the ability to respond to changing business requirements. They want cloud service provider-like flexibility, performance, and security even when they don’t have service provider-sized budgets.
The storage announcements at the recent HP Discover event in Frankfurt, Germany, have confirmed that HP is on track to deliver on these specific business needs with the latest installment in the company’s HP Converged Storage vision and a unique “ROI to the power of three” value proposition. This value proposition promises to help customers increase their return on information, infrastructure, and information with the latest generation of its HP Converged Storage product portfolio. This is how ROI3 works:
Return on Information
A recent Forrester survey of CIOs found that 72% of all respondents identified the need to make more informed business decisions as the top driver for enterprise information/data projects. Unfortunately, the performance of many current storage systems is a significant barrier to successful analytics implementations. One way that HP Converged Storage addresses this element of ROI is through the new HP StoreAll Storage platform featuring Express Query, an HP Labs-developed metadata database that quickens searches exponentially–up to 25,000 times.
This type of performance changes the game in terms of the how quickly organizations may query existing information when gathering business intelligence (BI), performing legal eDiscovery, or simply locating a file or set of files that match a set of search criteria.
Return on Infrastructure
HP helps increase return on infrastructure through two key commitments that HP makes with respect to helping customers get more performance and efficiency from their datacenter investments:
- First, HP guarantees that customers can reduce capacity requirements by 50%. This is accomplished through thin provisioning capabilities and efficiency benefits of HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage platform.
- Second, HP guarantees that organizations can double their VM density. Also a benefit of HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage, cutting data center physical equipment requirements in half while simultaneously improving agility is what return on infrastructure is all about.
Return on Individuals
Data centers are already difficult to manage, especially when it comes to getting the results businesses need from their storage systems. Storage management overhead is a particularly pressing issue. It adds cost without adding value, and it precludes IT staff from serving business needs in a way that is perceived as responsive to the business.
In response to this, HP offers up the final element of the “ROI3” value proposition: return on individuals, which is all about saving time. Businesses implementing HP Converged Storage such as HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage can save up to 90% of the time that IT staff has traditionally dedicated to storage management, freeing them to address more pressing business needs. These results are achieved by automating common management functions, centralizing management across storage systems, and providing a common set of data services across storage systems.
Many enterprise technologies have been out of the reach of most businesses because of the cost that is attributable to price, management overhead, or both. Storage systems have been particularly guilty of this, as small and mid-sized businesses have had to put up with trade-offs between simplicity, cost, and platform capabilities, making it difficult to justify investing in these systems since they cannot get the return they expect. For this reason, one of the most exciting pieces of product news to come out of HP Discover in Frankfurt was that HP put next-generation storage within reach of medium-sized businesses by taking the Tier 1 storage features of this platform and introducing them in a new system–the HP 3PAR StoreServ 7000 Storage system models.
HP 3PAR StoreServ 7000 Storage is accessible to the entire midrange at a starting price under US $25,000, one-third the prior entry price for HP 3PAR Storage technology. With this introduction, the entire HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage portfolio shares a single architecture from low to high–serving the low-end of the mid-range through to the high-end of the enterprise market and service provider customers.
The storage announcements at HP Discover in Frankfurt extend in important ways HP’s Converged Storage vision and strategy. By integrating and consolidating its Converged Storage offerings into design centers that simplify storage and increase returns on information, infrastructure, and information, HP is bringing to market modern storage architectures that are dramatically more responsive to business needs and challenges than what other storage vendors can offer using fifteen- to twenty-year-old legacy storage architectures.