As part of its initiative to grab leadership in the storage market, HP said today it will spend $50 million on a European initiative. And the company confirmed it will allow some, at least of its channel to resell the MC256 enterprise box. Patrick Bonelli, sales and marketing manager of the storage group Europe, said that HP had convened a meeting with its channel partners in Nice this Friday to explain its position. "We will allow our channel partners to resell the high end box but they have asked us to make it [the accreditation] tough," Bonelli said. "There will be between one to three in the major markets." He said HP will have three levels of accreditation for storage, non-certified, silver and gold. Only gold partners would be able to resell the box, which will compete with EMC's Symmetrix. Comparex, which operates in Germany, Benelux, Austria and South Africa was likely to receive a gold accreditation. In the UK, HP is talking to Morse Data, Hamilton Systems, Computacenter and Acumen, he said. On the distributor side, it was talking to PSI. ®