HP Geneva semi-officially canned

REMEMBER WHEN WE TOLD you that HP's storage division was not in good shape? No? Read this, this and this for starters.

There is more to it, but most of it is there. Briefly, for the research impaired, we said that EVA was in deep doo-doo. HP shut down the storage division in Marlboro, MA, and removed most of the people that mattered. Twenty or so were offered jobs in Colorado. All hopes were pinned on GenEVA, the great white hope due in 2007 or so.

OK, we were wrong, sort of. It seems that about a month ago, HP extended the lame duck EVAs, and then made them unlame. It cancelled GenEVA, the next generation fabric based great white hope of HP storage, and pushed out the life of plain EVA to make up for it. With no backup plan that we are aware of, it seems the future of HP storage is a Hitachi reseller programme.

As one HPer put it: "So,you don't have to worry about any competition from HP anymore, they're obviously not investing in storage for the future." Some jobs are being offered to people who moved out, other are not so lucky. It does seems that the optimistic view is that HP storage is on hold, not a bad thing unless you are in an industry which flies at a breakneck pace.

So, in a break from tradition, we asked HP about this a few weeks ago, and it confirmed that GenEVA was indeed dead. To paraphrase what it said, it is telling the customers that need to know, but it is not a big enough thing to crank up the press release machine. Since it was never officially announced, there is little reason to tell anyone who doesn't already know.

People appear to be leaving the storage division of HP in droves, and the ranks of really smart people are being thinned fast.

So, that brings us back to this memo. Without going over it in detail, let's just state the obvious, when HP puts out a talking points memo about us, it is almost a guarantee that we hit the nail on the head. It did it recently with the layoffs, it did it with (Gen)EVA. If you a 'The INQ is full of crap' memo, you know what to think. µ