HP Discover: Firm follows cloud and big data trends as it looks to end management dramas

Having posted a disastrous quarterly financial performance, lost Autonomy's Mike Lynch and confirmed 27,000 job cuts, this year's HP Discover conference was of huge importance for the company.

Throughout the event it was evident HP staff knew the company has gone through some tough times, as reflected by chief executive Meg Whitman in her keynote address.

"I wondered what I might find when I began digging beneath the surface of HP, the kind of turmoil that HP has had at the top can take its toll on the company, on employees and on shareholders," she said, with refreshing honesty.

Beyond this brief admission of turmoil, though, the firm used the rest of the event to unveil a slew of new cloud computing and storage solutions that it hopes will underpin its road to recovery.

Autonomy's IDOL
Despite the departure of Autonomy's Mike Lynch, HP placed a lot of emphasis on the company's Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL).

It used Discover to cement its support for Apache Hadoop, announcing plans to develop IDOL products for the data processing platform.

The partnership will let companies embed an IDOL 10 engine in each node of their Hadoop cluster, thus granting the use of the engine's 500 analysis and summary data functions.

This means that customers will be able to intelligently search through their data, making it easier to manage big data. HP went on the offensive with the launch, claiming it could out-perform many of its key rivals, notably Oracle.

It said the service is nearly four times faster than Oracle's current big data appliance, formed on the back of a partnership with Cloudera, another Hadoop distributor, announced in January.

The departure of Autonomy's Lynch from the firm itself was not touched on but asking one HP staff member about the loss and the disappointment was plain to see.

StoreOnce
The crown of HP's Discover event, though, was the arrival of its new StoreOnce storage platform with catalyst software.

Launched as part of HP's ongoing converged infrastructure strategy, the new StoreOnce is designed to help simplify and speed up big data backup and analytics for businesses.

HP claimed the service will boast data recovery rates at least three to five times faster than its prime competitor EMC, with backup performance of up to 100TB per hour and data recovery of up to 40 TB per hour.

The HP StoreOnce 48TB backup system is available immediately worldwide on packages starting $250,000.