HP eyes storage reform with $2 flash

Hewlett-Packard declared its commitment to infrastructure, the channel and a "new style of IT" at its summit in Mumbai, while releasing a range of new products including flash storage costing just "US$2 per gigabyte".

"A lot of companies no longer want to be in infrastructure," said Jim Merritt, HP APJ's senior vice president and general manager, Enterprise Group. "But [infrastructure] is what HP does and will do."

Merritt explained how HP's "new style of IT" aims to replace the "60-year-old" triumvirate of general processor, copper connectors, and tiered storage and memory.

"We need a new way," he said.

"We need special purpose processor cores – HP Moonshot is the first step. Then we need to replace heat-producing copper with photonics, which destroys distance. And we need to bring in a universal storage pool, which makes tiered storage obsolete."

As part of its storage reform, the US vendor announced its new 1.92TB cMLC drive that it claimed to bring the cost of flash "below US$2 per usable gigabyte", provided HP 3PAR compaction technology was used.

"This is the same cost as systems using performance-orientated spinning disk drives today," said a statement from HP.

Other infrastructure announcements coming out of the event in India included the Apollo family of supercomputers, with one model that utilises water-cooling; HP Virtual Cloud Networking SDN Application and the 7900 series SDN-ready switches; HP ConvergedSystem platforms for delivery of IT-as-a-service; enhancements to operational management software HP OneView; and HP Datacentre Care Flexible Capacity, a pay-as-you-go public cloud environment.

HP's virtualised networking ecosystem included an "SDN app store", said Amol Mitra, VP and GM of networking for HP APJ, in front of media gathered from around the Asia-Pacific region.

Stephen Bovis, VP ad GM of servers for HP APJ, said the enhancements to OneView and the ConvergedSystem range make for "workload optimised systems", which fit in with HP's "new style of IT" strategy. CRN US reported last month that HP was considering acquiring startup SimpliVity to further strengthen its appliance credentials.

All the infrastructure revelations were accompanied by assurances of quality in-house consulting from the giant vendor, with expansion to the HP Advisory Services program also announced. However, Merritt did take time to pay tribute to the channel.

"We have a revamped partner program that allows them to make money earlier," he said. "In fact, I'm going to Hong Kong next week for the partner advisory board, and that shows our commitment."

The reporter travelled to Mumbai, India courtesy of Hewlett-Packard.