Unlike the server and services announcements HP made at its Global Partner Conference, HP made its storage news with little fanfare on a company blog.

The HP P4900 SSD Storage System has 16 400 GB multi-level cell (MLC) SAS SSDs – eight in each of the system’s two nodes. Each two-node system includes 6.4 TB, and customers can add 3.2 TB expansion nodes to scale to clusters of 102.4 TB. Expansion nodes increase the system’s IOPS as well as capacity.

The systems use the HP SMARTSSD Wear Gauge, which is firmware that monitors SSD drives and sends out alerts when a drive gets close to the end of its life. The monitoring firmware is part of the P4000 Management Console.

HP claims the monitoring and scale-out architecture solve the major problems with solid-state storage arrays. “When it comes to SSDs in general, they are great for increasing IOPS and benefitting a business with lower power/cooling requirements,” P4000 product marketing manager Kate Davis wrote in the blog. “But the bad comes with unknown wear lifespan of the drive. And then it turns downright ugly when traditional dual-controller systems bottleneck the performance that was supposed to be the good part. … Other vendors must build towers of storage behind one or two controllers – LeftHand scales on and on.”

The large storage vendors offer SSDs in place of hard drives in their arrays, and there’s no reason they can’t ship a system with all flash. But the P4900 is the first dedicated all-flash system from a major vendor. Smaller vendors such as Nimbus Data, Pure Storage, SolidFire, Violin Memory, Whiptail and Texas Memory Systems have all-SSD storage systems.

A 6.4-TB P4900 costs $199,000. The expansion unit costs $105,000.

EqualLogic sales grew 66% year over year but Dell’s overall storage revenue only increased 7% to $543 million. Stifel Nicolaus Equity Research analyst Aaron Rakers points out that Dell’s 7% year-over-year growth in storage revenue compares to a percentage increase in the mid-teens across the industry. And while EqualLogic grew year over year to $164 million, Rakers said its sales dropped 4% from the previous quarter and Dell’s overall storage business declined 13% from the previous quarter.

Rakers’ estimates that Dell’s non-EqualLogic storage sales – mostly from EMC’s Clariion – decreased 7.4% year over year and 16.4% from the previous quarter. He pointed out that EMC midrange storage revenue rose 22% year over year and NetApp’s product revenue jumped 49% year over year last quarter.

“Dell’s results reflect a well-known fracturing of the Dell/EMC relationship [following] the Dell vs. HP bidding war for 3PAR,” Rakers wrote in a research note today.

EMC CEO Joe Tucci talked about the Dell relationship during EMC’s earnings call last month and again this week when discussing EMC’s acquisition of clustered NAS vendor Isilon, saying that the partnership has been damaged by Dell’s attempts to broaden its storage portfolio. Tucci also said the vendors are working to improve that relationship. The rift in the partnership began when Dell acquired EqualLogic in 2008 and widened when it try to add EMC competitor 3PAR.

Dell CEO Michael Dell said on his earnings call Thursday that “we have a 10-year relationship with EMC, and that continues to evolve. We’ll continue to work with them.”

But Dell also pointed out that his company makes more profit from selling its own storage, and will invest more money on storage products.

“There’s no question the portfolio of the business is shifting,” he said. “Profitability is increasing. If you look at our storage business, EqualLogic grew 66% and now is on a run rate of over $800 million. We have purchased Exanet to add CIFS and NFS file system capability and Ocarina to add deduplication and compression. We’re focused on growing our storage business.”

The new MSA is now called the HP StorageWorks P2000 line and the LeftHand iSCSI series is the P4000 series. This is just a wild guess, but you can expect HP to name the EVA the P6000 and the XP enterprise series the P8000 when those platforms get refreshed.

The P2000 G3 MSA features 8 Gbps Fibre Channel and 6 Gbps SAS connectivity, and scales to 149 2.5-inch or 96 3.5-inch drives for maximum capacities of 57.6 TB SAS and 192 TB SATA. Like previous versions of the MSA, the P2000 also supports Gigabit Ethernet iSCSI.

The new systems also support drive spindown and a new remote snapshot capability that lets customers replicate snapshots and remote copies (clones) to a second P2000 G3 array for disaster recovery.

Existing MSA customers can upgrade to G3 controllers. The G3 is priced at $9,950 for a dual-controller FC 3.5-inch drive array, $10,350 for a dual-controller FC 2.5-inch drive array, and $12,350 for a dual-controller FC/iSCSI combination 3.5-inch drive array. Those prices do not include storage capacity.

With the P4000, HP is getting rid of the LeftHand brand that it carried over after acquiring the iSCSI vendor last year. The P4000 is targeted at storage for virtual servers. New features include RAID 5 and RAID 6 software, a P4000 Unified NAS Gateway that lets customers store block and file data on one system, and pay-as-you-go pricing that lets customers upgrade in 12 TB increments. Pricing for the P4000 G2 SAN starts at $30,000.

IDC storage analyst Natalya Yezhkova says although HP still has four distinct SAN platforms, it is trying to streamline the branding of its storage products. “HP is getting rid of all the brands it has had,” she said. “The P series creates a sense of continuity. It was a complicated situation that HP is trying to simplify. It might create some confusion among customers and channel partners at first, but just temporarily.”

The Drobo Elite is the third model in the Drobo product portfolio, following the Drobo NAS box and DroboPro iSCSI appliance.

Drobo Elite connects up to 16 hosts — an update which includes new software to accomodate LUN masking and reservations as well as a second Gigabit Ethernet port– and inclcudes CHAP authentication for data security. The self-healing features, which Data Robotics calls BeyondRAID, remain the same.

A 16 TB DroboElite with 7200 RPM Western Digital SATA drives will be list priced under $6,000, Data Robotics director of marketing Jim Sherhart said. The company’s VARs may bundle Microsoft Small Business Server or VMware licenses in with the new box.

While Drobo’s self-healing features have won it fans in the consumer market, pushing into the low-end iSCSI SAN space will be a tougher row to hoe. DroboElite lacks features that have competitors offer, including native snapshots or replication, multiprotocol support, and connections to social networking services.

Sherhart says the eight-bay DroboPro will remain on the market for use as direct attached storage for SMBs.

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But Microsoft sent word today that WSS08 was released to OEM partners, which means you should be seeing products from the likes of Hewlett-Packard, Dell and others based on it over the next few months.

Microsoft has taken what was essentially a NAS platform — Windows Storage Server 2003 – and given it block storage capabilities with an iSCSI software target. WSS08 will also include single instance storage to store duplicate files only once. Microsoft will host a webcast introducing WSS08’s new features on Thursday.

Compellent’s revenue of $28.1 million in the first quarter of 2009 ticked up from $26.7 million in the last quarter of 2008. That earned Compellent $1 million in income. That and a 4% revenue increase are modest under normal circumstances but not bad during a recession. Compellent added 98 customers in the quarter, with 55% of its revenue coming from existing rather than new customers.

“We grew revenue by hitting a lot of singles,” Compellent CEO Phil Soran said. “We did not have large revenue deals to get us to this revenue growth.”

While it’s unlikely that big storage vendors such as EMC and NetApp are worried about a singles-hitter chipping away at their business, Compellent’s success helps showcase what people are spending their storage budgets on these days.

Compellent tends to sell its modular systems to smaller companies who use its software such as thin provisioning and Automated Tiered Storage to manage data better, and then buy more capacity when needed. These customers aren’t cutting back spending as much as large enterprises who have been overbuying storage for years.

“Selling into the enterprise is a little more challenging than in midsize enterprises, but we’ve made some inroads there,” Soran says, pointing to the addition of Travelers Insurance and the FBI as customers. “Large enterprises buy 30 terabytes every month whether they need it or not. The economy has affected them. In midsize companies, they know when they need it and they buy more storage when they need it. Customers still have to store data but find more efficient ways to do it.”

Compellent started rolling out solid state drives last quarter, and Soran says even midrange customers are using them. Hedge fund Munder Capital Management will appear at Compellent’s C-Drive users’ conference next week to discuss its use of SSDs with Complellent’s Storage Center system.

Automated Tiered Storage is a key piece of Compellent’s SSD strategy. The application is designed to move data intelligently among tiers, a capability industry experts and some of Compellent’s large competitors say will be necessary to make SSDs catch on.

“Automated Tiered Storage is the killer app for solid state devices,” Soran said. “People have to find a way to manage inactive data, and solid state heightens the need for it.”

Compellent also facilitates smaller purchases because it has one platform that customers upgrade by adding cards for different functionality and doing software upgrades instead of forklift upgrades. Soran says support for 8 Gbps FC, 10-Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and better integration with server virtualization is on the roadmap.

But Compellent’s streak of 14 straight quarters of sequential revenue growth is in jeopardy. The company’s guidance of from $27 million and $29 million for this quarter means it would have to get nearer the top than the bottom to increase over last quarter. It was also a little lower than financial analysts expected, although analysts see Compellent continue to stroke singles for the near future.

“In the field, we continue to see Compellent experience solid win rates, increasing deal sizes, and nice recurring revenue streams,” Amit Daryanani of RBC Capital Markets wrote in a note to clients. “Overall, we continue to see Compellent winning deals primarily on feature/function and scale.”

StoneyFly actually beat Dell to its official announcement of the PS6000 today with its rollout of the Voyager, an active-active midrange IP SAN. Voyager is available with Intel X-25E SSDs, or SAS or SATA drives. It also includes a 10-Gigabit Ethernet option – something that is apparently still on the drawing board at Dell.

It seems like just yesterday – or maybe this morning – that SSDs were considered something for super high performance tier 0 applications. Is anybody using iSCSI for that?

StoneFly product manager Jame Ervin says demand is high for SSD as well as 10-GigE.

“We have customers ready to go with SSD the minute it’s available,” she said. “They’re looking for any performance benefit they can get.”

As for 10-gigE, Ervin says it has the greatest appeal among service providers. “Those type of customers seem to have the most interest so far. They seem to be ahead of the game adopting new technologies,” she said.

IDC research analyst Liz Conner doesn’t expect SSD to be a large selling point for iSCSI before 2010, but with iSCSI use growing and budgets shrinking it’s worth taking a look at now.

“I see it popping up more for Fibre Channel SANs, but it will happen with iSCSI,” Conner said. “Most people will go with Fibre Channel for high performance, but with iSCSI offering more high-end features and the way the economy is now, it’s more of an option.”

Conner says 10-gigE is inevitable for iSCSI. “They can say, ‘we’ve got it now, you won’t have to upgrade later,’” she said of StoneFly’s strategy.

Dell officials did not return requests for comment today by Storage Soup, but several industry sources have confirmed the report is accurate and say the PS6000S will support 16 solid-state drives. A PS6000E will also be available with only SATA drives, according to one customer who asked not to be named because the product has not yet been formally released.

The general opinion on solid state is that customers will hold out for higher capacities and other features before they buy. Several EqualLogic customers reached by Storage Soup today said they still found SATA drives adequate for their needs.

However, according to Alan J. Hunt, Manager of Operations for Dickinson Wright PLLC, “It’s just the beginning of the market. In a few years I suspect [SSDs are] all we’re going to have–it’s kind of the beginning of the next big wave.”

Hunt added that a fourth port on EqualLogic’s arrays could be more significant than it might appear. “A fourth port means you would have balance if you have two switches and want redundancy,” he said. “Or you could make it a dedicated management port and still have three ports.”

Missing from the coming product update, if reports are accurate, would be 10-Gigabit Ethernet support, which a Dell spokesperson said last year is on the EqualLogic roadmap for 2009. But like with SSDs, EqualLogic customers and resellers say 10-Gig Ethernet can wait.

“I haven’t seen a susstantial interest in 10 Gig,” said Broadleaf Services account executive and EqualLogic VAR Christopher Baer. “There aren’t a lot of applications that require that kind of throughput yet.”

Other customers say 10-GigE would future-proof the array, even if they don’t need the bandwidth quite yet. “Why add another port? Why not 10-GigE and really get this thing going?” said a customer in the education field who requested that his name not be used as he is not authorized to speak with the press. Some pieces of the IT infrastructure in this user’s shop have been upgraded to 10-GigE already, including the network backbone.

“I don’t personally need the bandwidth,” Hunt said. “But it could add the ability to reduce the number of cables and passthrough modules for blades, as well as greatly simplifying VMware deployments.”

Most of LeftHand’s customers had them delivered like this anyway, as LeftHand’s software met in the channel with servers and were integrated by VARs. Still, come customers said they were disappointed that they could no longer use LeftHand’s software to repurpose existing hardware.

But this is not the first time a storage vendor has begun as a software-only play and moved into the appliance world once it was acquired by a larger vendor. That was the case with Avmar. Avamar began by delivering its host-based data deduplication software as an appliance, but large organizations could get better economies of scale by purchasing their own hardware from their usual supplier, or had standardized on a particular server build and didn’t want a noncompliant appliance sticking out like a sore thumb.

Thus Avamar went software-only, until it was acquired by EMC Corp. Soon after that acquisition EMC rolled out the Avamar Data Store, saying many of its customers didn’t want to have to assemble their own hardware/software clusters, especially in large environments (the company will still sell the product in a software-only version to users who want it, however). It didn’t hurt that EMC’s relationship with Dell flipped that economies-of-scale equation between Avamar and enterprise customers on its head, just like it doesn’t hurt for LeftHand that somewhere in the world, HP produces a ProLiant server every few seconds.

So I couldn’t help but think about all this when I met with a company a couple of weeks ago that has designs on being the heir apparent to LeftHand. StarWind Software and its eponymous iSCSI target software product are not exactly new. The product has been marketed for years by RocketDivision, a company headquartered in the Ukraine, which spun off StarWind Dec. 1.

CEO Zorian Rotenberg said StarWind is going to charge $2,995 for its most deluxe package which includes CDP, snapshots, repolication, mirroring, thin provisioning and an optional virtual tape library interface. That license fee also covers unlimited capacity in perpetuity.

StarWind is far from alone in value propositions of this type from a whole new generation of companies stepping up to pick up where LeftHand left off. StorMagic, Seanodes Open-e, DataCore, and Double Take’s emBoot are all on the market touting the benefits of commodity hardware and affordable, flexible software.

DataCore is a good example of a company that started off and remains software-only. And Enterprise Strategy Group founder Steve Duplessie suggested to me last year that server virtualization may change IT pros’ mentality around software-only storage. Meanwhile, the cloud data center has got people thinking about commodity hardware and horizontally scalable architectures. So it’s possible that the current “class” of iSCSI SAN software vendors will blaze a new trail.

But having watched the lifecycle of Avamar and LeftHand, I’m also wondering if it’s all just a little bit of history repeating.