Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

TAG TEAMS FORM IN FIGHT FOR STORAGE TITLE
By Simon Robinson for the451.com

The continuing importance of partnerships in the storage industry was again underscored this week as some of the industry's largest players announced extended and expanded deals with existing partners. Hewlett-Packard extended its commitment to continue using Hitachi's high-end storage array as the foundation of its own high-end offering. And Veritas and Network Appliance announced they were stepping up both the size and scope of their existing agreements, although the specifics of the deal remain vague. Viewing these announcements as growing evidence of an anti-EMC cabal within the storage industry may be slightly fanciful, but it's hard not to view at least the timing of both announcements as a response to EMC's recent maneuvers.

Impact Assessment

The message -- Partnerships were once again at the forefront of developments in the storage industry this week, as HP extended its pact with Hitachi for high-end storage, and Veritas expanded its strategic alliance with Network Appliance.

Competitive landscape -- With EMC being the common enemy of all four players, it's hard not to jump to the conclusion that some sort of industry cabal is being established. Both of these pacts were designed in some way to counter EMC's recent maneuvers.

The451 Assessment

When trying to overcome a particular problem, two heads are often better than one. This even applies in the storage industry, which ironically is more characterized by a lack of cooperation than one of partnership. But with EMC driving consolidation and back on track in high-end storage, the stakes are higher than ever. The HP-Hitachi deal is extremely timely and will be welcomed by existing customers. We'll delay judgment on the Veritas-Network Appliance deal until the two come up with solid deliverables.

HP's Storage Strategy

HP this week said it extended the OEM and technology agreement it has in place with Hitachi, through which HP uses Hitachi's high-end Lightning 9900 series storage array as the foundation technology of its own StorageWorks Disk Array XP Family. The deal -- first signed in 1999, when HP dropped incumbent supplier EMC -- was due to expire in early 2005. It will now run until at least 2008.

Bob Schultz, senior VP and general manager of HP Network Storage Solutions, said the extension of the deal sends out a positive message to current and potential HP storage customers, who typically make long-term committments of at least three years when buying high-end systems. That made it necessary for HP to demonstrate its continued commitment to the Hitachi platform sooner rather than later.

However, Schultz admitted the timing of the announcement was partly designed to allay a certain degree of confusion in the market over that commitment. The Hitachi platform, he said, had been "sewn" into the market. No competitors were named, although EMC is without doubt HP's key rival. Tensions between the two are likely to be particularly fraught at present because HP has lost two of its most senior storage executives -- first Mark Lewis and more recently Mark Sorenson -- to EMC in the last year. Schultz himself downplays the impact of these departures. "It's natural that people want to hire from the market leaders. It shows what good people we have," he said.

Shultz says HP so far has shipped over 4,000 XP units in total, and that HP's ability to combine its storage and servers with its own services practice continues to drive the company's storage business growth. HP currently is shipping more SAN units than the next three competitors combined, he claims, and the company continues to gain share in open SAN systems.

More generally, Schultz says, storage software will continue to receive most of HP's storage investment going forward, although he won't say whether this means acquisitions are planned. HP already has one of the most comprehensive SAN management tools with OpenView Storage Area Manager, he says, adding that HP will continue to invest in SANs by increasing network intelligence and improving scale. HP's two main efforts here are the Continuous Access Storage Appliance (CASA) (from StorageApps), of which it claims to have shipped 500 in total, and the VersaStor out-of-band virtualization technology from Compaq, which is being integrated with both CASA and Brocade's Fabric Application Platform (from Rhapsody), for delivery next year.

Schultz says HP already has agents ready to support the SMI (Bluefin) storage management standard, which will be ready for release as soon as the specification is ratified. That should happen in September. On the iSCSI front, HP is making no firm commitments to follow Hitachi Data Systems' lead and support the standard in Lightning by the end of the year. Instead, HP has committed to offer support in its product next year sometime.

Veritas-Network Appliance Partnership

Meanwhile, Veritas and Network Appliance also said this week they were increasing the scale and scope of their relationship, which will include joint sales and marketing activity, increased product integration and qualification and cooperative technical support. Exact specifics of the relationship have yet to be hammered out -- especially regarding how the two will cooperate on the sales front, although Veritas has ruled out selling any Network Appliance hardware -- but the emphasis seems to be on educating and motivating the channel. The two will be identifying mutual channel partners and conducting technical, sales and marketing seminars with selected partners and customers to extol the virtues of combined Veritas-Network Appliance systems.

The two have already cooperated on numerous technology fronts in recent years, such as developing backup and restore for NDMP, disk-based backup for Network Appliance's NearStore system, as well as getting Veritas' high-availability, clustering, replication, file and volume management, data migration and storage resource management software running on Network Appliance hardware platforms.

But despite this, the two admit they haven't done the greatest job of marketing this relationship to partners and customers, something the latest announcement is designed to address. Although Veritas's achievements are no small part a result of its successful partnership strategy, some of its historically strong partners -- especially EMC and Sun -- are becoming increasingly competitive. The Network Appliance deal should therefore be a timely response to any lingering questions over Veritas' partnering abilities, although it currently lacks any real substance.

Additionally, following Veritas' acquisition of Precise Software and Jareva, there's also plenty more software that Veritas can both optimize for the Network Appliance environment, and repackage for Network Appliance to sell. This is especially true in the application performance management. The deal also potentially provides Veritas with a credible network-attached storage (NAS) story, which it has lacked after withdrawing its own failed Servpoint NAS product some time ago. Veritas isn't the only one to turn to Network Appliance to shore up a NAS weakness in the face of stiff competition from EMC – Hitachi Data Systems inked a similar pact with Network Appliance late last year for similar reasons.

There are some areas of overlap where both vendors have substantial offerings, especially in file system and volume management, although the companies say there's enough differentiation between the two products to make it obvious to customers which vendor's tools are the most appropriate.

Competition

Veritas and Network Appliance deny that the alliance is a defensive move to shore up their mutual customers following EMC's acquisition of Legato. So does that mean it's an offensive move to attack the Legato customer base? It wasn't designed with that in mind, they say, although that could be one benefit of the relationship.

HP, meanwhile, says EMC's acquisition of Legato merely serves to underline the failure of its open storage software effort -- also demonstrated by EMC's recent decision to pull back on the development of its proprietary management middleware effort WideSky in favor of industry standards, especially SMI. Additionally, HP says it's not unduly concerned by EMC's acquisition of a struggling backup vendor.