Signaling HP's inevitable acquisition of 3Par, the technology giant today announced a new Virtualized Storage Service (VSS) aimed at boosting storage utilization and cutting storage costs.
HP's announcement made no specific reference to 3Par. However, the two key components of VSS are 3Par standards: thin provisioning and data tiering. It's likely that Dell -- which had until end of day Wednesday to trump HP's offer -- couldn't or wouldn't muster the resources to meet HP's $2 billion bid for the storage company.
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Part of the new VSS service is thin provisioning, a technology 3Par has boasted it does better than anyone else -- including HP's, which a 3Par exec deemed "chubby provisioning" back in 2007.
The key differentiators, 3Par has said, is that its approach to thin provisioning is autonomic and requires no reservations, meaning admins don't need to create and monitor separate pools for different purposes.
HP's new service also includes data tiering, which enables users to more data from one tier to another without an outage. Lo, earlier this year, 3Par unveiled a new approach to data tiering, based on what the company dubbed adaptive optimization software. The technology enables users with SSDs (solid-state disks) in their disk arrays to reduce disk count; it also enables users to combine multiple storage tiers within a single volume for a lower overall cost per gigabyte than Fibre Channel-only configurations.
HP, however, denies any connection between its VSS announcement and its bid for 3Par. "The new HP services capability we announced today is completely separate from the bid for 3Par. We are able to offer this new service by leveraging existing HP StorageWorks XP Disk Array and XP software," said HP spokesman Eric Krueger via email.
Still, the nature and timing of the announcement seems a mite coincidental. Perhaps relying on StorageWorks XP Desk Array and XP software were going to be HP's Plan B in case the 3Par fell through. Either way, expect HP to further bolster its storage offerings once the deal 3Par deal is finalized.
This article, "Update: HP signals 3Par acquisition with new storage services," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog.