OEM Interview #1

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OEM Interview #1

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6 Jan 2010 5:54 PM
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In our newest installment of “The Interviews” we will feature a genuine HP professional, Monica Lasgoity. We really appreciate this opportunity to get the prospective of someone on the flip side of the coin, an industry insider.  Monica is part of the official HP StorageWorks Division, and the launch of X510 Data Vault. Learn the reasons for the new X510 introduction to the market place, its target audience, and insights on what to come for HP.

Q Could you take a brief minute to introduce yourself and explain how you're involved with the Windows Home Server at the HP storage divisions?
  I'm in HP's StorageWorks Division and am responsible for the Americas GTM strategy and launch of the X510 Data Vault, which is a Windows Home Server product.  We introduced the product into the Small Business market on October 1st,  2009.
   
Q HP released three generations of MediaSmart Servers and the EX line was a huge success with the home enthusiast. Why launch another product series? (referring to the x510).
  You're correct.  The MediaSmart Server has been very well received in the marketplace.  But the two products are physically different and are targeting different audiences.  Several converging trends make this the ideal time for HP to enter the NAS market for emerging businesses.  First, the needs of smaller firms for these services have been driven home by recent disasters and regulatory and compliance demands.  Also, the need to share and collaborate to be competitive continues to grow.  Finally, the dramatic reduction in disk drive prices allows us to offer a high performance hardware solution under the HP StorageWorks brand at a price all emerging businesses can afford. 
   
Q Please tell us about the demographics targeted with the DataVault x510 series:
  The ideal customer is a small business with 10-15 employees and an environment of 10 PCs or MACs.  The product is licensed for 10 PCs or less and MACs and/or 10 users + 1 guest user.  The typical customer doesn't have time to understand how to set up and manage storage environments. In fact, the GUI that HP has layered on the Windows Home Server really delivers a simple, seven step, start up process (two steps of which are plug it in to electricity and plug it into the router!).
   
Q Do you consider the WHS to be more of a private consumer product or a business use product? 
  Our primary target is the small business users.  It offers a wide range of functionality.  The business user may consider the consolidated backup and bare-metal disaster recovery feature critical to their environment and view the media collector and server as an "added benefit" that allows them to promote their business.  Also, the ability to set up share folders for employees to jointly utilize is also a feature that would strongly appeal to a small business.  I like to say that the Data Vault can be the central hub for small businesses with it's combination of consolidated data backup and file sharing capabilities.
   
Q Please tell us about your personal WHS hardware? What are you running WHS on?
  I work out of my home so the Data Vault is the only WHS hardware in our environment.  I use the Data Vault as the primary backup for my work notebook.  Additionally, we have 4 other PCs and 1 MAC on our network.  We also feed a stream of photos from the Data Vault to a WiFi Smart Frame.
   
Q What's your favorite feature? 
  I particularly like the consolidated backup for heterogeneous environments of PCs and MACs.  It's a single solution for everything on our network.  It works in the background so I don't have to worry about everything being backed up. 
   
Q What are some of your favorite and/or most useful add-ins you have encountered?
  There are three that I use and find particularly helpful.  DiskKeeper, which helps you keep your disk clean and healthy.  Whist, which is a fun, photo sharing application. It creates a URL right from your Data Vault.  The add in WDDB. This allows you to make backups of the PC back ups on a second drive.  This gives you a second copy of your PC images within the Data Vault
   
Q Can you give us any thoughts or insights as to what may be coming down the road from HP?
  We're going to make more business centric add-ins more accessible to our customers.  We're actively evaluating other options for the next version, which may possibly include more client licenses, potential for active directory technology, a way to sync multiple Data Vaults together.


We hope this provided some insight into the topic of the Data Vault, please feel free to comment, ask questions, and let us know some your questions that we can incorporate into future interviews as we are always eager to bounce ideas.

Thank you

Comments
  • 7 Jan 2010 11:15 PM

    The x510 looks great but looks like it is the same hardware as the MediaSmart EX495?

  • 9 Jan 2010 12:26 AM

    Nice interview....Im looking forward to seeing how home servers evolve in terms of business use in the coming years.  Looks like HP is really trying to gear some hardware towards businesses.

  • 9 Jan 2010 1:19 AM

    Very nice interview, thank you. HP is the first one after learning stuff over the WHS system. The others have to follow this very good status from HP. HP set's a new status of the WHS in business..

  • 10 Jan 2010 9:00 PM

    I vote for more client licenses becase 10 are simply not enough. AD integration sounds overkill and I would really like HP to create some for of parental controls for small business and centralised inter-office IM client. Good read thanks