HP CEO Meg Whitman characterized HP’s storage as “a tale of two cities” during the company’s earnings call Wednesday. “3PAR continued to gain strong traction in the marketplace, growing more than 100 percent year-over-year,” she said. “At the same time, tape and EVA are declining. This is an anticipated product transition and we’re effectively managing the shift to our next-generation storage arrays.”

This trend has been ongoing ever since HP acquired 3PAR in late 2010. HP CFO Cathy Lesjak added on the call that 3PAR has replaced EVA as the vendor’s largest revenue storage array. She said the two midrange platforms grew a combined 19% year-over-year compared to one percent overall storage growth. That means without 3PAR, HP’s storage revenue declined.

HP said its StoreOnce deduplication software nearly doubled in revenue, but that product had little revenue a year ago before it was relaunched last November.

HP’s earnings report Wednesday was filled with poor results, and storage was no exception. HP said its 3PAR sales nearly doubled but the rest of the business stumbled, especially the midrange EVA platform. HP’s overall storage revenue was $955 million in the quarter, down 6% from a year ago and nearly 12% from the previous quarter.

HP acquired 3PAR for $2.35 billion in September 2010 after winning a bidding war against Dell. 3PAR is HP’s flagship storage product, but it will take more than just 3PAR to turn around HP’s storage business.

HP’s 6% drop compares to a 12% revenue increase for the overall storage industry in the fourth quarter of 2012, according to Aaron Rakers, the enterprise hardware analyst for Stifel Nicolaus Equity Research. In a research note published today, Rakers wrote that EMC’s fourth quarter results were up 10% year-over-year (5% without Isilon numbers) and 14% from the previous quarter. NetApp revenue increased 26% year-over-year (4% without Engenio) and Hitachi Data Systems revenue grew 15% year-over-year and 13% sequentially.

Dell last week reported storage revenue of $500 million. That was down 13% from last year, reflecting the loss of EMC storage that Dell used to sell through an OEM deal. Revenue from Dell-owned storage increased 33% from last year and 19% sequentially.