HP Nudges Ahead In The Storage RaceHP Nudges Ahead In The Storage Race

The only storage dragon customers need to slay is the interoperability beast. Storage is most often secure, networked, and super fast. But storage administrators still pull their hair out because nearly all of them maintain storage networks with components and software from multiple vendors.

So the race is on for the major enterprise storage vendors--EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, and Sun Microsystems--to lay it all out for the sake of interoperability. That means trading storage system sales to be the storage infrastructure vendor who serves as the primary point of contact. HP on Wednesday will unveil an architecture and strategy that give it the lead in an ongoing battle.

HP's Enterprise Network Storage Architecture Extended (Ensa X) blueprint gives customers a road map for advanced storage management functionality, including virtualization and resource management that's supposed to work across any vendor's storage. More important, HP hopes to get the attention of business executives with some of these capabilities that could make companies more efficient and save a ton of money.

"Ensa X will help companies manage storage from a business view," says Howard Elias, HP's storage boss. "Administrators will be able to retain Exchange documents, safeguard multiple instances of SAP, and help establish business continuity processes."