So consolidating your storage and having that shared by a number of servers has been more efficient and easier to manage. But the downside is that it tends to be relatively proprietary. When you buy from a single manufacturer you need to continue with it and it tends to limit how you grow. Our view is that storage will have to move to a network-centric environment that is not proprietary, not only in terms of servers and operating systems, but also in an automated, managed network that can scale both up and out. Major said that in a storage-centric world, companies need the capability to scale up and out.
Customers scale up by adding to their specific architecture.
But we believe customers need to be able to grow their environment as suitable. They may need to add network-attached storage at some point in time, or they may need to add very granular pieces of storage in very distant spots but still manage that as a single piece. That is scaling out. The FSAM concept embraces both scaling up and scaling out to grow the environment, but allows users to continue to manage that from a single point with a single set of centralized resources. FSAM is driven by the HP NSSO and incorporates technology ranging from large disk arrays to simple tape devices, as well as storage area management software.