HP is increasingly demonstrating that its vision includes positioning itself as an innovator at the high end especially with respect to managing heterogeneous storage assets. HP appears to be a leading proponent of avoiding dreams of owning the entire data center storage infrastructure. Rather its aim appears to add customer value by recognizing and accommodating the diversity of installed storage assets at customer sites.

By introducing external thin provisioning, increased performance, high capacity SATA devices and VMware support on the XP24000, combined with the XP20000 "Diskless" as a direct competitor to virtualization appliances, HP delivers the broadest variety of options to heterogeneous storage virtualization. Behind this flexibility is a consistent set of architectures and storage management products. ITCentrix believes that the XP24000 and XP20000 represent the most advanced and flexible storage platform in the industry, with heterogeneous virtualization and cross-array heterogeneous tiered storage.