HP eyes EMC’s storage market

HP has released a StoreOnce data deduplication back-up system, which it claims can ingest data at 100TB per hour – three times faster than EMC’s recently launched Data Domain 990.

HP said the competition-beating speeds can be achieved when combining its recently enhanced $250,000 (£163,000) StoreOnce B6200 back-up system with its new $37,500 StoreOnce Catalyst software.

Speaking at the company’s annual Discover conference, Dave Donatelli, executive vice-president of enterprise servers, storage and networking at HP, said: "We are in the middle of transforming the storage industry. We have completely changed the way back-up is done in the industry. We think it's a game-changer." 

David Scott, general manager at HP storage, said the product outstripped EMC’s latest offering. “At EMC World, EMC announced the latest generation of Data Domain technology with Boost, its equivalent of Catalyst. But when you compare that with today’s announcement, you can see that lead lasted two weeks,” he said.

EMC said HP’s calculations were misleading. “Unlike the HP StoreOnce, the performance of the DD990 system is not derived by adding the performance of multiple appliances that can be managed together. If that was the case we would add the performance of 20 DD990s (all of which can be managed from a single Data Domain Enterprise Manager console) together, and market a 620TB per hour system. That would be pretty ridiculous,” a spokeswoman said.

Research firm IDC placed EMC’s share of the global back-up appliance market at 65%, followed by IBM at 15%, with HP at just 4%. However, the prize for increasing share in this market is significant, with the research firm predicting the total global market value will grow to $5.9bn by 2016, from $2.4bn at the end of 2011.

Tim Stammers, senior analyst at Ovum, said if HP’s claims proved to be right, then it would steal some of EMC’s market share. “If HP's performance figures represent real-world performance, then HP is set to take business away from EMC. Potential buyers will be testing the HP devices to see if they deliver those throughputs with their existing back-up applications and datasets,” he said.

Dave Russell, research vice-president, storage technologies, at Gartner, said HP was targeting EMC instead of its nearest competitor IBM to send a specific marketing message. “EMC is the market share and mindshare leader in deduplication, so HP is targeting the largest provider, but also simultaneously attempting to signal that HP can address the requirements of very large enterprises,” he said.