Why did Hewlett-Packard merge its server and storage groups?
Your competitors who have already reorganized their operations in this way might claim HP is just following the pack. To be clear, we’re not folding the storage business back into the server business. If you look at the name of the group, it’s called the enterprise storage and server group. This is not about storage becoming a peripheral to the server group. We’re not just attaching storage to our servers; we’re enabling the networked storage environment. What is HP’s role in developing the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S), and when can users expect SMI-S enabled product to hit the streets? We led a group that submitted the Bluefin spec to the [Storage Networking Industry Association], and we’re shipping early SMI-S interfaces in two of our storage arrays. The plan is, as we go through this year, we’ll roll out SMI-S as interfaces in our products. Our belief is this is one of the key enablers of the SAN market overall. A year ago, we did API exchanges with IBM, Sun,
