HP apparently has struck an agreement to acquire Polyserve, one of EqualLogic’s technology partners. Here is the announcement on HP’s website. The announcement describes this as giving HP an entry position in the enterprise NAS market. That’s an interesting idea, now we’ll see if HP actually integrates Polyserve’s technology as a bundled NAS product offering like the way Netapp and other NAS vendors do.
Acquisitions are often difficult, but this one could turn out well for HP. The idea of using blade servers for clustered NAS heads has merit, especially when compared with disk-heavy clustered NAS systems. The trick will be in coupling their NAS-blades with a back end SAN that provides the flexibility and scalability that such as architecture demands. I hope that HP continues to support the standards that are implemented in Polyserve’s product today so that SAN vendors like EqualLogic can continue to provide a solution for customers that want their clustered HA file services with our frameless iSCSI SAN.
