back to article HPE confirms Belfast-based 3PAR engineering office to close

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is to shutter its 3PAR engineering office in Belfast, Northern Ireland, but the firm emphasised the move does not mean it is shifting focus from 3PAR to Nimble storage. The Belfast 3PAR team came into being in 2007 when HP set up a Global Centre of Software Engineering Excellence at Forsythe House, …

  1. druck Silver badge

    Disasters

    I wonder if HPe going cold on 3PAR has anything to do with the recent highly publicised disasters.

    Mainframe TITSUP totals Oz tax tech, again

    Let's all go down the Strand (our data centre). King's College London goes TITSUP*

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Disasters

      Well, what was once a solid 3Par code stream has gone pretty sideways on recent versions. Or maybe people think the Nimble purchase was just because they like collecting companies?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Disasters

      First link : was an IBM mainframe issue. Yes the ATO had issues with the SAN in a different outage...but there are other user circumstances there if you read the detail.

      Second link : was someone *supposedly* pulling the power on the SAN...not sure why that would be considered a 3PAR disaster. IT generally needs electricity to function.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Disasters

        Nah, the Kings college issue might have been triggered by a power issue but lots of drives failing and losing data is a 3par issue, hence there being a financial settlement.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Disasters

          Still a huge 3PAR user so can't blame the 3PAR too much!

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    That's Funny...

    HP said the same thing about EVA when they purchased 3PAR

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: That's Funny...

      But EVA was crap from the beginning.

      When you take a good product and make at crap, fire all the people that develop it and then hope that splashing the cash on a new victim I mean storage company maybe you should take a long hard look at yourself and either retire to printer ink sales...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: That's Funny...

        Or change your name again, something like Symantec should do it...

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: That's Funny...

          "An insider indicated HPE could be putting more technical smarts on its acquired Nimble Storage than 3PAR"

          Not an insider in the know then, we're do they work the canteen ?

      2. Mr.Nobody

        Re: That's Funny...

        The EVA wasn't crap at first. It was a pretty well thought out array in the time the few fiber channel storage solutions were a clarriion (talk about crap, and expensive), an EMC DMX (the most expensive and complicated storage one could buy) and an FC connected netapp.

        The EVA was far more flexible and easier to use than the EMC options, and it actually performed very well.

        HP bought compaq, and all the EVA engineers said screw this and quit, and HP didn't have anyone that really knew the product anymore. One of its biggest knocks was a lack of async replication. They put that in place, but it WAS crap.

        By that point HP was already drooling over 3par, most likely because they knew the EVA was doomed since they couldn't adequately develop it into a modern product.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: That's Funny...

      Ah yes but 3PAR did everything that EVA did and much much more it also scaled way above anything EVA could do, It's No1 in its space and can still more than happily compete with any other product out there.

      Nimble is a great platform but it simply doesn't have the scalability, feature set or today the enterprise chops to displace 3PAR any time soon. What it does do though is provide 80+% of the features in software at a great price point for the lower end and midrange market. In many ways it's more of an appliance based solution than something like 3PAR which also sits well in that market and if you're happy to cluster multiples you can keep scaling and maintain that investment.

      But in all honesty It simply isn't going to displace 3PAR, don't believe me ? get familiar with the architecture of the two platforms and it's obvious where one stops and the other starts, but then again if you did know the technicalities throwing that FUD probably wouldn't be as much fun.

    4. This post has been deleted by its author

  3. jesseslash

    "But EVA was crap from the beginning."

    Great! Please, I said absolutely ZERO about whether it was a good product or not, let alone superior. I stated a fact. HP did indeed communicate to its customers that EVA would not be EOL'd by the purchase of 3PAR. I was there, I heard it, I read the communications from HP to the customer.

    "but then again if you did know the technicalities throwing that FUD probably wouldn't be as much fun."

    See above.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      And they didn't EOL EVA for a long while after the 3PAR purchase, in fact there's still quite a few about.

      Despite the marketing it was absolutely obvious 3PAR would push EVA aside. 3PAR was superior in every area, whereas that's just not the case for Nimble.

      But be honest it's not like other vendors haven't been and won't be doing this in the future i.e. EMC CX to VNX to VNX2 and now all new Unity based on VNXe whilst Compellent is left out in the cold.

      But rather than trying to score points it's probably worth thinking about the talented team in Belfast who are now potentially out of a job.

  4. Zerolab

    history repeats itself:

    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/11/hp_eva_future/

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    You're all reading far too much into this. I work for HPE, in this area, and I didn't even know we had an engineering office in Northern Ireland!

    1. circusmole

      So...

      ...if you don't know about it it cannot be important. Yeah right.

      @AC> You're all reading far too much into this. I work for HPE, in this area, and I didn't even know we had an engineering office in Northern Ireland!

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Haven't been at HP in years but I used to work for 3PAR and then HP through the acquisition. Disclaimer : I now work for a competitor, but I'm still quite fond of 3PAR and have a healthy respect for what the technology can do

      If you've ever used Peer Persistence on 3PAR, these guys wrote it and were looking after the engineering support (Level 4 support) at the time for everything replication

      It's a real pity as we're talking about a really great bunch of talented engineers and I'm afraid it does not bode too well for the future of 3PAR when the company decides to kill an engineering team that was responsible for bringing key features such as PP which brought massive revenues to HP(E) for the past few years...

      Of course no vendor is not going to announce they're stopping investment in a product even if they choose to do so. It would be stupid to announce something like this until they've fully ramped up the replacement product, it's just standard practices to avoid losing repeat business...

      1. ManMountain1

        Massive revenues? PP is actually quite a niche product. A lot of customers don't even take array based sync replication, let alone peer persistence. It's bad news for the team themselves, but the development will not be stopping!

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Certainly not niche in Europe and that's a big market for HPE

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