HP Ties 3PAR to CloudSystem
When Hewlett-Packard dropped a jaw-dropping $2.4 billion for cloud storage provider 3PAR, it left many scratching their heads.
HP paid so much for 3PAR, a company with about $200 million in revenues, after a protracted and very public bidding war against Dell as the two companies looked to shore up their cloud storage offerings. Now the company is making the 3PAR technology available with HP's new CloudSystem.
CloudSystem, launched in mid-January, is a turnkey appliance based on HP's converged BladeSystem server-, storage- and network-based hardware and loaded with the company's Cloud Service Automation (CSA) software.
The HP 3PAR Utility Storage offering can now be managed by CloudSystem, which company officials said will simplify the deployment of cloud solutions. Available now, initial configurations will be customized until next quarter, when a configuration tool will provide SKUs and more standardized pricing, according to the company.
Furthermore, HP has integrated the 3PAR Utility Storage with the HP X9300 Network Storage Gateway based on networked attached storage (NAS) technology it acquired from IBRIX in 2009. In so doing, HP said it will be easier for cloud providers to add both block and file-based storage capacity on demand. Pricing starts at $45,500.
HP has also integrated 3PAR technology available with its BladeSystem Matrix orchestration platform. "Now we can orchestrate, manage and provision applications across both the server and the network and now also the 3Par storage environment," said Tom Joyce, VP of marketing strategy and operations for HP's enterprise storage business. "So we have comprehensive management across the top of the whole thing, combined file and block solutions."
Available now, HP BladeSystem Matrix starts at $190,000. HP will add support for its Storage Provisioning Manager next quarter.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on March 03, 2011