HP detunes Violin, tunes up 3PAR
Violin: 'The current HP Violin relationship remains unchanged'
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HP has decided to curtail its reselling agreement with Violin Memory in favour of concentrating on 3PAR solid-state storage.
HP has been reselling Violin Memory's v-31xx and v-32xx flash memory array products since July of last year via a Hardware Product Purchase Agreement (HPPA). We understand it has no intention of extending or expanding this reselling agreement, but it will naturally maintain it in the interests of its customers. The reason behind the move is that HP is focussing on 3PAR solid-state storage, with company spokesperson's official statement being: "HP 3PAR is our strategic direction for solid state storage."
Violin Memory's statement reads:
The current HP Violin relationship remains unchanged. The VMA product family (the Violin 3000 and vSHARE software) continue to be available to customers via HP as per the announced relationship (HP VMA-series Memory Arrays). HP engineering continue to certify the VMA with additional servers, operating systems and joint selling and promotions. POC (proof of concepts) are currently active as are additional HP certifications.HP has stated 3PAR is the long term strategic direction for their company. Violin offers other products like the Violin 6000 through both our direct sales and our global reseller network as well as other software and system vendors which have been announced over the past 12 months.
It is our understanding that a purpose-built flash array with a ground-up designed software and hardware controller infrastructure, such as Violin' products, would deliver much better and more reliable performance than a disk drive-based array populated with solid-state drives but using the original disk drive array controller software. HP's strategy may involve extending the 3PAR array controller software to better manage a set of SSD resources.
Violin Memory flash array cards
There has been speculation that this revelation of a limit to the HP Violin Memory reselling deal could force Violin to change its rumoured IPO filing – if such a filing exists – because it could materially affect future income from HP for Violin. This may or may not be the case, of course.
The importance of flash-memory storage is such that general moves by mainstream storage players to have their own flash storage array technology are to be expected. ®
COMMENTS
Re: HP Violin
So I guess you haven't read the bit in both IBM and EMC's best practices where is says only use thin provisioning for workloads that can tolerate some 'performance variability'?? Whereas over 90% of 3PAR customer thinly provision everything. And no need to set up silly thin provisioning pools or reserve space ... blimey, so many rules and provisos when using thin provisioning with everyone else!
And yes moving from fat to thin will save you space, obviously but how many other vendors will guarantee that you can buy a smaller array?? HDS, EMC, IBM etc all need to land the data on the new array and then thin provision it, so you still need to buy a 100TB array if you are moving from a 100TB array. 3PAR thins on the way in so you only need to buy a 50TB array in the first place!!
Haters gonna hate, but 3PAR thin provisioning is light years ahead of everyone else's.
Re: HP Violin
I'm seeing exactly that lately, lots of 3PAR pitches where the Lefthand kit would be more suitable and cost-effective. Even the P2000 in some cases - I've seen some pretty wild discounts on the F-class starter kits just trying to get people on to the bandwagon. Most medium businesses and up are being pitched 3PAR when HP is asked to come to the table.
Re: seems like another decision in a long line of bad ones
"EMC OEM deal....." Everyone used to have to OEM EMC just as everyone had to OEM Brocade Silkworms back in the day, as EMC was the default choice for top-end enterprise UNIX. IBM learnt this to their cost. HP dumped EMC when they realised the Hitachi-based XP was much, much better than Symmetrix, etc.
".....Hitachi OEM Deal....." Which allowed HP to not only poach EMC customers but also work with those multi-vendor UNIX customers that wanted one storage device for UNIX, mainframe and Windows.
"......Palm Acquisition/Sale....." Deabateable. I'm not sure how many patents it landed hp for the $1.2bn but it cost them less than the $12.5bn Google paid to buy Motorola's patents.
".....EDS acquisition/write-off...." IIRC, hp's consulting services are still making money.
".....PolyServe acquisition....." Que? That just sounds like sour grapes considering hp bought Polyserve from under Dell's and IBM's noses.
".......Lefthand acquisition...." Yes, because they haven't sold any P4000 or VSA systems, have they? Oh, wait - yes they have! AIUI, a lot of them displacing old NetApp NAS.
".....Ibrix acquisition...." <Yawn> See Polyserve above.
"......3PAR acquisition....." Growing marketshare, making profits. You must be an ex-Sun director if you think those things are bad for business.
".....Tying only 2 products from Violin to only BCS Server Sales (DL980 or HP-UX i2 products)....." It looks like Violin was only a hold-over until they got a fully-SSD 3PAR sorted. One of the warnings with Violin is that no-one has bought them despite the hype. Violin has left it too late and it looks like the hype-bubble will burst before the IPO.
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