How could a company as mighty and diverse as HP have had so many issues with executive management?

HP stumbled mightily in 2011, and it had nothing to do with product or people. Even sales remained strong, though the PC business is changing. HP’s mighty stumble was a crisis of confidence due to a chain of shenanigans at the very top. This culminated with the short reign of Léo Apotheker, leaving HP to reassure the market of its strategy.

HP And the Enterprise IT Industry

Sometimes, it’s hard to get a sense of scale when talking about very large things. How big is the solar system? How far away is the nearest star? The same is true of earthly things, exemplified by popular misconceptions about the global financial crisis. It’s difficult for people to understand just how much money a trillion dollars is.

In my little world of enterprise storage, it’s difficult to reconcile “big storage” players like EMC and NetApp with “big storage and everything else” players like HP, Dell, Oracle and IBM. Sure, EMC and NetApp lead the pack in terms of market share, but they’re nowhere near as large as the integrated players. HP has more than 7 times the revenue of EMC, which makes 3 times more than NetApp.

This old slide might need updating, but you get the picture...

HP is an incredibly diverse company, dominant in the PC, printing, and blade server market and top 5 just about everywhere else, including networking, services, and enterprise storage. And HP has nearly 325,000 employees, all working to move the company forward in one direction or another.

NetApp is a motorcycle, with one drive wheel pushing it forward at high speed; HP is more like NASA’s shuttle crawler-transporter, a 16 motor mammoth. Single-purpose companies can be agile, but they can also be derailed by market downturn or technological shift. Storage specialists like NetApp continually try to innovate and acquire to keep themselves vital, while larger companies like Cisco and EMC try to diversify while maintaining market leadership. HP doesn’t need to try; it is diverse.

HP Is a Very Large Thing

I watched HP's rise in the server market of the 1990's

HP has long been synonymous with innovation, high-technology, and silicon Valley. I have been an HP customer as long as I have been in IT, and watched as they integrated technology from Apollo and Convex in the 1990’ s. The server products that resulted became the dominant UNIX platform, but HP’ s innovative storage concepts didn’ t take the market by storm.

After HP merged with Compaq (which brought Tandem and Digital Equipment Corporation), the company vaulted ahead in the Wintel market and also gained valuable storage expertise. Throughout the last decade, HP was firing on all cylinders and dominant in nearly every arena. The company owns half the blade server market, is tied for first in servers, leads in PCs and printers, and is a contender in networking and storage. It’s simply impossible to say what HP is in a single sentence.

HP storage has an extremely broad product range, which management is working to reconcile. Acquisitions of LeftHand, Ibrix, and 3PAR gave HP storage shot in the arm to be sure. An injection of startup mojo has energized the marketing and product groups within HP just when the company needed it. HP’ s market share has grown somewhat as a result, though not as much as the hyper-focused NetApp. HP networking similarly took on 3Com, bedeviling Cisco in the Ethernet switch market.

The Executive Soap Opera

It takes a lot to bring a mammoth to its knees, but a shot between the eyes usually does the trick. While the many engines of HP push it forward, the company’s upper management has seemed, at times, suicidal. Business schools could design an entire curriculum around the folly of Patricia “I spy” Dunn and Mark “penny-pinching” Hurd. Who would think that HP management could top this?

From August 2010 through September 2011, HP dominated IT headlines in completely the wrong way. The board wanted a change, and selected Léo Apotheker to transform HP. But it was a soap opera from the very start, with Oracle hiring Mark Hurd and sending Apotheker into hiding among accusations of corporate espionage while at SAP.

The new CEO didn’t seem to understand HP at all, though he was intent on steering it in a new direction. Apotheker set about dismantling HP’s consumer and end-user businesses, killing Palm/WebOS and threatening to sell off the PC business. The company was to focus instead on enterprise computing, but these drastic moves spooked the entire industry.

It wasn’t long before HP’s board struck again, with a shake up at the hands of Ray Lane and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman brought in to replace Apotheker. The first order of business for the new HP executive team appears to be reassuring the entire world that management has not gone completely insane.

Stephen’s Stance

To an outsider like me, the most disappointing thing about HP’s mighty stumble is that it has nothing to do with the people who really make the company what it is. I have met many creative, hard-working individuals in HP’s storage, server, networking, and printer groups, and they could not be more different from the executive soap opera. I only hope that this new board and CEO will bring some stability and let HP cruise forward once again.

Disclaimer: HP has sponsored the Tech Field Day events which I organize, and has on occasion invited me to attend events at their expense.  But I do similar work with nearly every company in the IT industry, and this piece is my own opinion.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2012. | HP’s Mighty Stumble
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

• Tech Field Day 5 links
  • Official stuff:
    • Tech Field Day 5: The Links
    • Tech Field Day 5: The Videos
  • Rob Novak shared his Thoughts from Tech Field Day 5
  • A great post by Greg Stuart: Symantec NetBackup 7 for VMware vSphere 4
  • I loved Tom’s Things I Learned From Tech Field Day, Part 1
• My writing
  • I’ve wanted to write this for quite a while: ATA over Ethernet protocol overview for data storage managers
  • I talked to Intel this week and wrote it up: Where Is Intel’s FCoE Solution?
  • Another big area for my virtual storage seminar preparation: VMware VAAI Storage Array Support in Plain English
  • And finally: Aerobie AeroPress Review: The Hacker Coffee Maker
• Other great stuff I’ve been reading
  • Barry Burke responded to my VAAI post with some competitive digs: reality check vsp vaai support
  • From Robin Harris is a DEC obituary: Ken Olsen, 1926-2011
  • A clever piece by Tom Petrocelli: Public Clouds : An Unregulated Utility
  • vKernel has a good point to make: Dear CIO’s, Please Send Paul Otellini a Thank You Note
  • Chris Evans covers the arrays we saw at TFD: Data Robotics Releases Business-class Arrays
  • Ivan Pepelnjak (inspired by Greg Ferro): Open FCoE – Software implementation of the camel jetpack
  • I loved this infographic: The Most Common and Dangerous Passwords
  • And this one: A Decade of Storage
  • Another great piece by Chris Evans: Managing iSCSI on Windows 2008 Core with Hyper-V

Subscribe to my Google Reader feed or follow me on Twitter to see these in real-time.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Back From the Pile: Interesting Links, February 11, 2011
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, Everything, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Do you want X-series or P-series storage? Is A-series networking gear any good? And where did all these HP products come from?

HP has always been an alphabet soup company, assigning just about every item in their bewildering array of products a unique product number. Like Mercedes-Benz cars, even the product names are a mix of letters and numbers that can be off-putting to browsers. Now that they have grown to supersize proportions through internal expansion and acquisition, just about everyone outside the company seems to have trouble decoding the product line, so I decided to take a stab at decoding the enterprise lineup in plain english.

An Important Note

This is not a political activity. I’m not trying to comment on which product is better than which or pigeonhole something by calling it “midrange” when HP thinks it’s “high-end”. I’m trying to be descriptive and helpful to prospective buyers working to understand the multitude of products sold by HP.

I welcome your input. In fact, I demand it! I don’t know which product is which and need your help to improve this list. Please feel free to comment and suggest corrections and additions (wireless?)

Storage Products (“StorageWorks”)

HP’s storage products are divided into three categories:

• P-series is block (SAN) storage using Fibre Channel or iSCSI
• X-series is file (NAS) storage
• Disk backup will presumably get a letter series in the future

Storage Product Notes

HP engineering input into OEMed products ranges from minimal to substantial. The EML tape library, for example, is very different from the standard Oracle (STK) product on which it is based. The high-end Hitachi-based storage includes substantial HP input as well.

HP StorageWorks VP of Marketing Tom Joyce informed me that the 3PAR T- and F-Class boxes won’t be renamed at this point. This is probably a good move – capitalize on the value of the 3PAR name rather than the virtually-unknown “P-series” nomenclature.

Others tell me that the StorageWorks 4400 is hitting end-of-life in the now-ish timeframe. So it won’t get a new name either.

Networking Products

HP’s networking products are divided into three categories:

• A-series is enterprise-class core switching, routing, and 200+ AP wireless
• E-series is mid-market and SMB switching and smaller wireless
• V-series is SMB and SoHo web-managed and unmanaged switching and wireless

Networking Product Notes

HP’s 3Com acquisition focused primarily on the H3C (former Huawei/3Com joint venture) high-end switching and routing products. Although some 3Com gear remains in the E-series line (particularly stackable switches), the low-end fixed-port switches have seemingly been eliminated from the product line. The Colubris acquisition provided HP with scalable wireless products now slotted below the H3C gear.

Stephen’s Stance

Product lines are always confusing at large companies, and doubly so where acquisitions bring in legacy products and customers. I wish HP the best of luck sorting all this out!

Note: The photo at the top is of a Japanese clone of the Enigma Machine from World War II.

Image credit: Japanese WWII Enigma Machine by Radio Rover

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Stephen’s HP Product Line Decoder Ring
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

My affinity for the command line probably explains my fascination with clever fonts. If you’re like me, I think you’ll chuckle at the bizarre combination pictured below.

Two stupidly-cool fonts in action: My normal DEC VT220-like terminal and a super-large terminal with super-tiny Tom Thumb displaying Hamlet. All of Hamlet. No kidding.

VT220 Terminal

That green-on-black window is my standard terminal. It’s an awesome duplicate of the original DEC VT220 font that really brings back my days sitting at “the Wedge terminals” at WPI. The font is “Glass TTY VT220” by Viacheslav Slavinsky. I’m running it at 20 points to make it look perfect.

In the window is Carole Gunst’s blog post from HighTechHistory.com announcing publication of the autobiography of Digital co-founder Harlan E. Anderson, “Learn, Earn, and Return: My Life as a Computer Pioneer.” I thought that was apropos.

Tom Thumb Hamlet

The one in the back is just plain weird. It’s a terminal using a miniscule yet readable font, “Tom Thumb” by Robey Pointer (based on a font by Brian Swetland). I used FontForge to convert Robey’s BDF to an OS X-compatible dfont package and fired it up in Terminal at 6 points.

Since I was using the 27″ iMac with crazy-huge 2560 x 1440 resolution, I got curious about just how much information could be displayed in a Terminal window at once. Running Terminal at 633 x 197 characters yields 124,701 characters on screen, along with the scroll bars, header, and menu. That’s enough for every word of Hamlet on screen at once. Including footnotes. Wow!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Two Stupidly Cool Terminal Fonts
This post was categorized as Apple, Computer History, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

On the contrary, I suggest that the enterprise storage world we know was shaped by singular innovative products of the past. Without these, the IT world might look very different.

While you’re at it, check out my list of the coolest enterprise storage flops!

So let’s take a walk through history, identifying the ten most innovative and important enterprise storage hardware products. But let me note first that this list could be 100 items long, and we all have our favorites. Lots of the storage blogging world contributed their ideas, too!  So I’m setting some arbitrary rules to keep myself on track:

1. The products have to be reflected in the shape of modern enterprise storage for open systems. If their day came and went, they’re not listed here.
2. Hardware only – I’m working on another list for software!
3. Listed products have to have been successful in the market (or they’d probably fail rule number 1 anyway), so I’ll put together a list of cool flops later.
4. For product families, I tried to pick the most influential and innovative 2member.
5. This is an enterprise storage list – items have to be used in big companies, not little PCs.
6. Only one product per company (sorry, IBM and EMC!)

So without further ado, on with the list!

1964 IBM 2311

Let’s get one thing straight: IBM is responsible for much of modern enterprise computing, so it’s no surprise that when it comes to storage, they developed just about everything, including disk drives, floppies, tapes, arrays, and libraries. So why pick this particular piece of kit? Prior to 1964, computer components were developed as a set (the 350 storage system went with the 305 RAMAC, for example), but the 2311 changed that. It was a generic storage device, plug-compatible with a range of computers. If you claimed that the 2311 was the common ancestor of all modern enterprise storage, I would certainly agree with you!

Other notable IBM products worth mentioning:

• The original 1956 RAMAC 350 disk drive unit
• The 1961 301, which used a separate arm and head for each platter (like every disk drive produced since)
• 9-track tape, which dominated from 1964 until the 1/2-inch tape revolution in the 1990s
• The 1970 3330, which added error correction and remained in production for 13 years
• The 1971 introduction of the 23FD floppy disk drive
• The 1973 3430, whose “30/30″ code name caused people to refer to hard drives as “Winchesters”
• 1974′s 3830 “MSS” tape library
• The 1980 3380, which introduced film-head technology
• 2003′s SAN Volume Controller, the first successful SAN virtualization product (after many others failed!)

1976 Shugart SA-400 minifloppy

Alan Shugart’s floppy drive was a massive hit in the home computing market, but why include it in a list of enterprise storage technologies? Because its storage interface set the standard for plug- and protocol-compatible storage in the nascent microcomputer world.

Designing a general product for use in a multitude of systems was truly innovative, and many later computers were literally designed around both the concept and physical form factor of Shugart’s drive. Simply put, this fat floppy drive inspired computer designers to create computers that could accept standard peripherals, the very definition of open systems. The definition of “peripheral” would soon grow to include standard I/O devices like storage, terminals, printers, communications gear, and everything else we know today.

1980 Seagate ST-506

Shugart left his company in 1979, founding Seagate Technology. That company’s first product was the ST-506, a 5 MB hard disk drive that shared its physical shape with the SA-400 and used a similar interface.

Like the floppy, Shugart’s hard drive set the standard for microcomputers, eventually finding its way into enterprise systems, and catapulting Seagate to its current position of disk drive leadership. Higher-capacity derivatives of the ST-506 were fitted with interfaces using Larry Boucher of Adaptec’s SCSI protocol, which continues in use even today. Although the ST-506 wasn’t a “smart” drive, the ecosystem that developed around it was critical.

1984 DEC TK50

Digital Equipment’s introduction of the MicroVAX II in 1985 was accompanied by a new half-inch backup tape drive and cartridge called the TK50. Open-reel tapes had dominated non-disk storage before this, but cartridges quickly replaced reels, leading to the development of tape robotics and (more) reliable off-site storage.

If you picked up a TK50 tape today, you could be forgiven for mistaking it for a modern SDLT or LTO, because these use a similar cartridge and drive form factor, the same linear tape technology, and the same half-inch tape size. The TK50, DLT, and SDLT were the mainstays of open backup for decades.

1987 Auspex

This terrible photo is an actual Auspex press image!

What was the first open systems enterprise storage array? Leveraging Sun’s NFS protocol, and hiding a Sun workstation inside, Wizard of Oz style, the Auspex set the standard for everything we think of as “enterprise” in the open systems world. The company’s storage systems were truly ahead of their time, with ranks of redundant disks years before RAID became common.

Auspex was founded by Larry Boucher, father of SCSI and founder of Adaptec, and raked in sales while others struggled to figure out how to sell in the enterprise.  But their refusal to produce a smaller device would be their undoing. Today’s monolithic arrays owe as much to Auspex as they do to IBM, but the companies producing them could learn a lesson from the company’s demise.

1987 StorageTek 9310 PowderHorn

StorageTeks versatile and scalable 9310 PowderHorn defined backup

StorageTek was instrumental in many enterprise storage developments (see McData, for example), but one product literally transformed the datacenter: the 9310 “PowderHorn”. Consider the “glass house” datacenter tours that the largest companies would use to impress visitors: They would show off their mainframe, their Cray, or their PowderHorn.

This versatile system would accommodate every major tape cartridge format and system type and could scale to truly massive proportions. When disks were expressed in megabytes, PowderHorns held terabytes. 

1995 EMC Symmetrix 3000

EMC's Symmetrix 3000 family brought mainframe block storage technology to open systems

The 1990 introduction of the Symmetrix was the key turning point for the (now) giant of Hopkinton, but the first two generations were mainframe-only. In 1994, the company delivered data replication capability in the form of SRDF, moving key enterprise functionality to the storage array.

But it was the 1995 introduction of the third-generation Symmetrix 3000 that really changed the storage world. For the first time, open systems could connect to mainframe-class storage over the standard SCSI protocol and leverage features like SRDF and (in 1997′s Symm 4) TimeFinder.

One key ingredient often overlooked in the Symmetrix was in-box virtualization the likes of which hadn’t been seen before. It also featured RAID-like sub-disk data protection, though the Symmetrix line never did implement true RAID.

The Symmetrix was redesigned entirely in 2003 to become the DMX. Although it was as different from its predecessor as the New Beetle was from Volkswagen’s original, the DMX line continued many of the philosophical underpinnings set in 1990.

EMC also deserves credit for their original Celerra enterprise NAS system, which picked up where Auspex left off. The company followed these in 2002 with the Centera CAS system, which abandoned many traditional concepts of enterprise storage, like blocks- and filesystem-access and modular and monolithic architecture. The Centera is certainly innovative, but we have yet to see the impact it will have.

1994 Data General CLARiiON

Data General paired the CLARiiON (left) with their AViiON server

It’s easy to forget the world before RAID. But Data General was one of the first to market with a cached RAID system with their 1991 introduction of the HADA. Although this early system was tied to DG’s servers, it donated much of its architecture to a system that became more valuable than the rest of the company: CLARiiON.

Massively successful, and mighty impressive (PC Magazine called the first CLARiiON “amazing”), this modular block storage array set the template for over a decade. There were dozens of copycat arrays on the market within a few years of the introduction of the HADA. The CLARiiON gained Fibre Channel support, was sold to EMC, and remains a mainstay of corporate data centers, albeit with updates to every component. I have administered every generation of CLARiiON array, and can attest to their capability (when properly configured!)

1996 NetApp Multiprotocol Filer

NetApp's F330 Multiprotocol Filer was a huge hit in mid-size businesses and a major upgrade

NetApp (nee Network Appliance) was formed by a group of ex-Auspex engineers who wanted to create a more modular NAS server based on industry-standard hardware. They released their first product, the NFS-only FASServer, in 1995, but it was their August, 1996 introduction of the Windows-compatible Multiprotocol Filer software that really put them on the map.

Combined with their solid F220, F330, and F540 hardware, NetApp now had a serious challenger to Auspex, and their NAS systems blew away dedicated server-based solutions in terms of flexibility and manageability. NetApp’s unified NFS, CIFS/SMB, and HTTP access to content on their unique WAFL file system was impressive at the time, as was the quick setup and administration and the ease of adding drives to their RAID-4 sets. Plus, they brought a new level of friendliness to the data center with their bright colors and silly “toaster” nomenclature.

1999 McData Fibre Channel Director

McData has an interesting history, beginning with Storage Technology (StorageTek), intersecting with IBM, bought and spun off by EMC, and lately acquired by Brocade. Although the company spent a decade developing various peripherals for IBM mainframe systems, their late-1994 introduction of a switching director for ESCON traffic would change the storage world. We take large-scale SANs and LANs for granted today, but McData’s director was astonishing when it was introduced: There were no words to describe it or its function at the time, and period press articles are puzzling!

EMC scooped the company up a year later, but McData was spun out in 1997, adding Fibre Channel support that same year. In the ensuing years, McData became the enterprise SAN “arms dealer”, supplying IBM and EMC with the ED-5000 and ED-6064 directors. I recall commenting at the time that Fibre Channel connectivity built around the McData director was the first Storage Area Network worthy of the name. McData went IPO in 2000 and was purchased by rival Brocade in 2006. McData’s director architecture survives and thrives today against fierce competition from Brocade, Cisco, and others.

Others To Consider

What would you have included in this list? Here are some honorable mentions that I wish I had room for:

1. StorageTek “Aegis” L700 library
2. Brocade “LOOM” 2xxx switches
3. Adaptec SCSI HBAs
4. Copan MAID
5. EqualLogic iSCSI arrays
6. EMC Centera
7. HP EVA
8. HDS USP
9. Compellent Storage Center

Responses

Here’s a list of responses that others have posted:

• Marc Farley’s Top 10 List
• Alex MacDonald’s Bottom 10 List

See my posts on Gestalt IT for similar enterprise IT infrastructure commentary

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Top Ten Innovative Enterprise Storage Hardware Products
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.