LAS VEGAS – How to manage big data has been a challenge for companies of all sizes and sectors. Companies need to develop strategies to deal with the volume, variety, velocity and value of a huge amount of structured and unstructured data. Although still in the early stages for many enterprises, big data figures into the pipelines for vendors, users and partners.
EMC brought the issue into focus at last year’s EMC World by titling the event “Cloud Meets Big Data.” Now, EMC has become Hewlett-Packard’s top rival — at least when it comes to deduplication solutions and big data. During press conferences at HP Discover 2012, HP talked about how the company has worked to address deduplication and make steps forward in big data solutions, comparing HP’s new deduplication solutions (for the StoreOnce backup family) to EMC Data Domain.
HP unveiled several updates of its current solutions and the integration of management tools. Among the new releases, HP highlighted a new deduplication solution for the HP StoreOnce Backup family; enhancements to its Information Optimization Solutions portfolio; a series of cloud-based solutions; Vertica 6, the latest version of its analytics platform software; the HP Data Protector 7; HP Automated Network Management (ANM) 9.2 for Converged Infrastructure; and the new HP Virtual Connect for 3PAR with Flat SAN technology.
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Branded Catalyst software, HP said the solution reduces recovery time, capacity needs and bandwidth costs while offering leading backup-and-restore throughput when combined with the enhanced HP StoreOnce B6200 Backup. “HP has leapfrogged EMC,” said David Scott, SVP and GM at HP Software.
The comparison between HP and EMC solutions was the subject of the press conference, as well as many one-on-one interviews. C-level executives spent some time discussing how HP StoreOnce has the advantage of lower dollars spent per terabytes per hour. “HP StoreOnce is a single technology from SMB to enterprises,” said Scott.
As an example, Scott highlighted a MetroPCS case study of switching its legacy storage EMC Avamar Clariion Centera to HP StoreOnce B6200 with data protector H3PAR with x3800 NAS gateway.
“HP Converged Storage is designed for the future. Its strategy transforms the enterprise storage industry with two next generation products: modern storage architecture and data protection,” noted Dave Donatelli, HP Enterprise’s EVP and GM. HP Converged Storage is under HP Converged Infrastructure.
Sean Kinney, HP Storage director of product marketing, noted that once data is growing at 40% to 50% per year, deduplication technology is a key application to protect big data at a reasonable cost without having to spend 50% more each year. Kinney noted that EMC’s solution does not have the same features as HP, which puts EMC behind. “HP is built on a scale-out architecture; HP has a common deduplication and comes with two nodes which address high availability. And it also has backup on protection information which increases restoration performance and speed,” Kinney explained.
Another big issue is related to data security. If information protection is the next battleground, HP wants to be prepared. The company is targeting a market expected to be worth $5 billion by 2015 — and certainly looks to take a big share of it. “Legacy processes and technologies are in need of reinvention,” noted Donatelli.
However, when asked about other competitors, HP downplayed rivals such as IBM. “IBM does not have a competitive offer,” Donatelli said. “We believe in a new generation that can cover multiple products in one combined architecture and cover a very large part of the market. We have not seen that from many competitors.”
Indeed, HP looks to overtake EMC’s hold on the market, while IBM is much more focused on high-level enterprises.
Over the next few years, the battle over storage will be on the deduplication field. And it is quickly becoming an issue on which CIOs are focusing efforts. The question now is not what deduplication is, but how to implement it to better answer big data needs.
HP provided travel expenses to this event.
