HP Poised To Release New
Storage Products
(01/10/01, 5:38 p.m. ET) By Kim Renay Anderson, TechWeb News
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. |
