Brief chat with David Scott, SVP of HP Storage

I had the opportunity to speak, unexpectedly, with David Scott, the Senior Vice President and General Manager of HP Storage, in the bloggers lounge today at HP Discover.  Scott is the former president and chief executive office of 3PAR and assumed the role of SVP and General Manager of HP StorageWorks Division, now HP Storage, back in October.  Fresh off of his keynote this afternoon on the direction of Converged Storage for HP, I asked him about the ways that HP is integrating the 3PAR arrays, when we can expect better EVA performance tools and about the new 10 Million firmware code for the EVA arrays.

EVA customers will be seeing a lot of the 3PAR intellectual property integrated into EVA’s in the years to come.  New features like the thin-provisioning and the data LUN migration features are already visible examples of this cross over.

One big difference between EVA and 3PAR storage arrays is the ability to monitor performance.  3PAR is excellent at it, EVA is not.  I asked about the forthcoming EVA performance package which is supposed to be available this fall, and he said it is on schedule.  Currently, EVA customers are forced to use EVAPerf data to view performance, but there are no tools to take this raw data and interpret it.  Customers must send this to HP for analysis.  There isn’t a real time monitoring/management package from HP and the final reports produced by HP support are cumbersome and hard to interpret or correlate.

Scott and I also discussed the new 10 Million firmware code for the EVA platform.  My company has been fortunate to get early access to the firmware for two new arrays in our environment and it appears to be rock solid.  Scott confirmed that he is hearing the same from other customers.  He thinks that many of the earlier issues with the EVA firmware for the x400 series have been resolved and customers can expect better reliability from these new arrays.  The 10 Million code is the code that has been touted all weeks in Las Vegas that powers the new P6000 EVA series.  Although the P6000 has some hardware changes, all of the software features are available to customers with previous generation EVA arrays if they have active maintenance contracts.

All very positive news for HP EVA customers.  This week, we have seen a extended commitment to the EVA platform moving forward from HP.

In the interest of full disclosure, HP and Ivy Worldwide invited me and paid for my trip to HP Discover.  Even though, I am trying to relay the information as impartially as possible.