I’m now at home after the HP Discover event, trying to connect all the dots of the HP big Picture.
One of the most interesting announcements I saw during these days is the store360 strategy.

What

Well, HP has three storage products based on HP x86 hardware, respectively: X9000 (a scale out NAS), P4000 (an iSCSI block storage) and StoreOnce (a VTL with deduplication capabilities). The goal of this strategy is to build a unique underlying operating system (based on Linux) and share pieces of code and related features among the three platforms.

Why

Thinking single unified platform makes a lot of sense, you can obtain the best from every system and discard the rest!
Joining different team forces can also accelerate and improve the development process and help produce better results.
Sharing code and APIs also means sharing the same way to do things and the same way to manage storage: to the same actions follow the same reactions and a single GUI for management could be a reasonable result too!

When

It’s today or tomorrow (that’s for sure) but, it will surely be an incremental approach. In fact the three aforementioned products will continue to live in their actual form and the new (or updated) features will be added step by step.
The big advantage, in this case, is that all the products already share the same computing platform (x86 proliant servers) so, any future upgrades, will be probably granted to all actual and future users.

Final note

This is the right way to go! In the past one of the critics that many people moved to HP was not on the impressive storage line up itself but on the lack of integration it showed. Now HP is doing what the customers are asking for: addressing simplicity and consistency to integrate the different products and lower associated management costs to allow a better TCO.

Disclaimer: HP invited me at this event and paid for travel and accommodation but Iā€™m not under any obligation to write any material about this event.