Semi-OT:HP Poised To Release New Storage Products
By Kim Renay Anderson, TechWeb News
Jan 10, 2001 (2:38 PM)
URL: techweb.com
Hewlett-Packard Co. is set to unveil several new storage-related products next week, part of an expanding effort to carve out a larger niche in the increasingly lucrative storage sector. HP (stock: HWP) plans to release the Surestore Ultrium 215 next week, an LTO drive that follows the fall debut of the Ultrium 230.
HP is also expected to release the HP Surestore Disk System 2100, HP Tape Array 5300 for storage service providers, and two new ultra-slim servers next week.
With the new LTOs, HP continues to compete with Seagate Technology Inc. and IBM Corp. (stock: IBM) in the effort to mine gold in the storage tape market, analysts say.
HP's new drive will significantly improve the time it takes to restore data, said William Hurley, analyst at the Yankee Group in Boston.
As the cost of technologies based in hard drive drops, this product may be used to archive data, while disk drive solutions may be used for backing up and restoring data, he said.
"HP is keeping abreast of changes in the storage tape market where they have had a strong presence within small- to medium- sized business and enterprises," said Hurley. "These new products are important for them to continue to keep their position in the marketplace."
LTO is a tape standard, commonly known in the industry as Ultrium. It competes with the DLT standard developed by Quantum Corp (stock: DSS), though analysts predict that LTO will dominate the storage tape market in two years because it is compatible with a number of different drives.
"With IBM, Seagate, and HP producing Ultrium drives and many companies reselling them as OEMs, the product will create a market presence very quickly," said Randy Kerns, analyst at the Denver's Evaluator Group.
In addition to creating its own storage products, HP, Palo Alto, Calif., resells other manufacturers' storage offerings, including Hitachi Ltd.'s XP 512 and XP 256 products.
The cost of HP's previously released Ultrium 230 is $5,325 for the external drive and $5,505 for the internal drive.
The company would not comment on the price, availability, or shipping arrangements of the 215. But Ultrium's rival DLT from Quantum starts at $1,708 for the comparable 4000 SCSI model.
HP Surestore Disk system 2100, which is geared to customers with Windows NT-based environments, is an automated backup device that supplies 293 Gbytes of storage within 1.74 inches of rack space.
HP Tape Array 5300 is a hard drive for mid-sized companies with a rack environment and increased storage requirements.
The release of HP's Surestore Disk system 2100 and Tape Array 5300 is sign that there is revenue to be made in rack storage market, said John Webster, analyst at Illuminata in Nashua, N.H. |
