SNW Europe 2011: Storage ‘has to change’ for the virtual world

As virtualisation picks up pace, questions are being raised as to whether the current crop of hardware can live up to the technology.

This was the view of Chris Johnson, vice president of storage in EMEA for HP. Speaking at SNW Europe 2011 in Frankfurt today – attended by Cloud Pro – the executive claimed there needed to be a shift in the storage industry and it was about time it happened.

“Storage has to change,” he claimed. “If we cast our minds back to the last disruptive change [it was] 20 years ago.”

Johnson argued the invention of virtualisation had changed the way workloads were presented to storage and, as a result, new storage technologies were needed to handle the different types of data.

“There were complete separate technology silos… with very predictable workloads,” he added. “It was very structured… and, really, IT was in charge of the critical path of delivering a new service.”

“The world changed [with] VMware, shortly followed by Microsoft Hyper-V [and] it had a direct impact on how the storage environment reacted.”

With these “world changing” products, Johnson claimed workloads became “very complex” and “very unpredictable” and it lead to extra appliances and layers having to be “bolted on” to existing storage infrastructure to make it work.

“We recognise there are still big transactional [workloads] so HP will continue to support those environments,” he said. “However, we have this newly virtualised environment which requires an almost entirely different approach.”

Johnson and HP think they have this area addressed already thanks to their successful, albeit pricey, acquisition of 3PAR last year. He claimed as the technology had been built for the “virtual computing era,” 3PAR products were ready to deal with these unconventional workloads.

The storage executive also revealed the company it paid over $2.4 billion for was “absolutely exploding at contributing to the storage [division’s] contribution” to HP following its annual figures, which were only shared in-house late last week.

For more news and views from SNW Europe 2011, check out our round-up page here.