In the short run, both, says Mark Lewis, formerly of Compaq, and now head of the HP's Network Storage Solutions (NSS) group. But over the next 12 to 24 months, customers will slowly be encouraged to migrate to new products.

For midrange and high-end disk storage, customers will have freedom of choice: The company will support both Compaq's modular Enterprise Virtual Array, or EVA, as well as HP's XP line, which it OEMs from Hitachi Data Systems. Compaq's MSA 1000 will become the company's default entry-level storage offering.

With NAS, Compaq's S1000 device will provision the entry-level, while the midrange will be serviced by HP's SureStore NAS 8000 series. Enterprise NAS, meanwhile, is an area that HP will "spend time and energy to come up with a best-in-class product ... more of a [NAS/SAN] convergence p...

Tape libraries will come from Compaq's StorageWorks line, and will be outfitted to support LTO, of which HP is a co-developer, in addition to DLT and SDLT.

On the software side, HP OpenView will become the default storage management console, with a bit of Compaq SRM, and HA/replication technologies thrown in. HP's OmniBack assumes responsibility for backup, while Compaq's VersaStor will be the basis of the company's virtualization strategy, incorporating HP's StorageApps technology along the way. Compaq ProLiant servers will double as management appliances.

The new company's storage roadmap didn't appear to surprise any analysts. "It all made sense to me," says Steve Duplessie, senior analyst at the Enterprise Storage Group, adding that "it will be interesting to see how they integrate the StorageApps stuff with the VersaStor program."