HP – TechVirtuoso

The Calm Before the Storm – HP Tech Forum 2010

June 21st, 2010 at 11:36 AM 1 Comment Frank Owen

I am on the ground in Las Vegas at the HP Tech Forum 2010 at the Mandalay Bay. This event will show HP and their partners newest technolgoy and how they plan on making the “Converged Infastrucure” that we have been hearing about fall in line.

I will be attending keynotes, hands on sessions as well as trolling the floor and talking to the many HP Partners that will be presenting at the expo. I will be tweeting about anything I hear and see that I find interesting and snapping shots and uploading them to Flickr as the day goes by.

If you have anything you would like to see or if you want to get answers about specific technology from HP Execs let me know!

Disclaimer: HP has provided my flight and accomidations for this event. However they have no control over the content I produce. My opinions, tweets and blog posts are my own.

TV Guide for May 3

May 3rd, 2010 at 3:21 PM 4 Comments Michael Stanclift

Microsoft will be adding a plethora of interesting features to Hotmail this summer. Chief among them is support for Exchange ActiveSync. This will allow users of any mobile device with ActiveSync support to receive push email, as well as synchronize calendar and contact information. Previously this feature was only available on Windows Mobile phones, and only in a limited fashion. Also coming soon is full SSL encryption on the Hotmail website, instead of just the Live authentication process. Microsoft is also expected to add conversation view, think Exchange/Outlook 2010, but in Hotmail. All of these features are things that Google has offered on Gmail for a while now and that Microsoft needs to play catchup with power users.

Microsoft has also announced that it will be providing full support for HTML5 video in Internet Explorer 9, and will be doing so using the H.264 protocol. Recently Apple has also been throwing support behind H.264 as the HTML5 video codec of choice for Safari. Apple has somewhat famously taken on Adobe in recent weeks saying Flash video is no longer the preferred option for Internet users going forward. Awkwardly, Microsoft agreed.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS was released on April 29. The latest version is a long term support release, meaning updates will be published for 3 years on the desktop and 5 years on the server versions, compared to only 18 months with standard Ubuntu releases. This makes LTS a great platform for business deployments where doing full release upgrades every 6 to 12 months can be a major hassle. The latest version is lighter on features than normal Ubuntu releases are, but still sports the latest stable and public versions of GNOME, X.org and the Linux kernel. It also features a refreshed theme, ditching the brown and orange for a purple and black theme. There is also a new optional “lighter” theme that has a hint of brown instead of the standard Ubuntu color scheme. Boot times, especially on SSD drives have also been dramatically improved.

Palm is dead. Well, actually, HP purchased Palm for $1.2 billion. The only hope for the WebOS platform now rests with HP and their commitment to “double down” and release new and improved hardware. Pending regulatory approvals, the deal is expected to close rather quickly in July of this year. Hopefully we’ll start seeing some HP branded WebOS devices starting this fall or winter.

HP Blades Tech Day 2010: The Beginning

February 24th, 2010 at 1:29 PM No Comments Frank Owen

I am heading to Houston today for HP Blades Tech Day 2010. It will be two action packed days of information and interaction about HP’s blade solutions and their infrastructure software. This will be the second HP Tech Day that I have attended and if this one is anything like the first it will be a incredible event.

I will be blogging and tweeting about anything that catches my eye. Here is a list of the other Expert Bloggers who will be attending the event.

Kevin Houston – @kevin_houston – http://bladesmadesimple.com
Greg Knieriemen – @Knieriemen – http://www.storagemonkeys.com
Chris M Evans – @chrismevans – http://www.thestoragearchitect.com
King John Obeto – @JohnObeto – http://absolutelywindows.com
Rich Brambley – @rbrambley – http://vmetc.com
Simon Seagrave – @kiwi_Si – http://www.techhead.co.uk
Martin McLeod – @martinmacleod – http://www.bladewatch.com
Devang Panchigar – @StorageNerve – http://www.storagenerve.com
Stephen Foskett – @sfoskett – http://blog.fosketts.net

Calvin Zito from HP will also be attending with us. His blog link is below.

http://www.communities.hp.com/online/blogs/datastorage/default.aspx

You can follow all the action by searching for the Twitter hastag #hpbladesday. Greg Knieriemen has also put together a Twitter list of all attendees.

Updated: Added more info and someone I missed to the list!

This trip was sponsored by HP. HP paid for the travel arrangements and most meals for 10 bloggers to visit the HP Houston campus.

Microsoft CES keynote fails to excite

January 7th, 2010 at 8:28 AM No Comments Michael Stanclift

If you couldn’t get a chance to watch the Microsoft CES pre-show keynote last night, you didn’t miss much. If you were actually at the event, I feel sorry for you, it must have been hard to stay awake.

After starting late due to power issues (which fried one of the Microsoft demo units on stage) the keynote got off to a rather boring start with Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, giving various statistics about how well recently released products like Windows 7 and Bing are doing. For the first half hour, the audio stream for the webcast was so bad, it kept cutting out and then required constant volume adjustment. Note to Microsoft, hire a decent sound engineer next time.

If you’d like to watch the keynote for yourself, you can see the saved version on the Microsoft website.

It was all pretty much downhill from there. The much discussed “Courier” tablet that many in the tech press was excited they would announce never came, and there were no details about Windows Mobile 7… at all. Only “we’ll have more about mobile at Mobile World Congress.” So overall, the keynote failed to deliver much of anything that we didn’t know or have not seen already. But, here is a breakdown of what was covered, after the break.

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HP and Converged Infrastructure

November 4th, 2009 at 1:41 AM 3 Comments Frank Owen

HP_logo HP is announcing today HP Converged Infastructure, a group of new and revitalized HP products that will revolutionize the way IT looks at their datacenter solutions. This virtualized collection of network, storage and shared servers can be virtualy allocated to meet the growing needs of the business faster and easier than ever before.

The HP Converged Infastructure consists of four major platforms. HP Infrastructure Operating Environment, HP FlexFabric, HP Virtual Resource Pools and HP Datacenter Smart Grid.

TechVirtuoso was able to speak to Lee Johns on a conference call earlier today about the Storage Works products that would fall under the HP Virtual Resource Pools category. The three products that the call focused on were the HP StorageWorks X9000 Network Storage System Family, HP StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform v3.0 andHP StorageWorks Cluster Extension EVA software with Microsoft Hyper-V Live Migration.

The HP StorageWorks X9000 family leverages technology from the aquisition of IBRIX and can scale up to 16 PetaBytes. HP is planning on an inital release of three revisions from the X9000 family available for shipment November 16th for as low as $1.50 a GB. The X9000 family includes the X9300 Network Storage Gateway; a 2 unit rack mount solution that brings scale out services to HP or 3rd Party arrays or sans, the X9320 Network Storage System; a highly available scale-out storage solution and the X9720 Network Storage System which will serve and store hundreds of terabytes or petabytes of file based data. The X9720 will ship on January 4th.

The HP StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform v3.0 (or just SVSP v3) allows IT to simplify management of HP and 3rd party SAN devices. V3 brings some major improvements to the platform including simplifing the creation of LUNS. SVSP V3 is currently available starting at $31,032 for an entry 1 terabyte configuration which includes the hardware and the SVSP VM license.

The HP StorageWorks Cluster Extension EVA software with Microsoft Hyper-V Live Migration is a new product which will give a high availability solution to Hyper-V users currently utilizing multiple EVA units. It will allow for auto-failover of application services as well as read and write enabling of remotely mirrored mir-range storage over your MAN. The HP StorageWorks Cluster Extension EVA software with Microsoft Hyper-V Live Migration will be available on November 25th for a U.S. list price of $5280.

Note: Some links may not work until HP officially announces these products. They are scheduled to release the announcement at 9:00AM 11/4/2009.

HP ProLiant G6 Q&A

October 14th, 2009 at 1:53 PM 4 Comments Shane Pitman

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to join in on a discussion with Greg Huff, HP’s Chief Technologist for HP’s ProLiant servers team, as a followup to the HP ProLiant Tech Day and Web Jam event that we attended back in March. While the discussion was focused on some of the material that we had gone over back in March, a few points were raised that I wasn’t aware of. Points that, in my opinion, HP should be putting a little more emphasis on in their marketing and advertising. Primarily, the amount of HP’s intellectual property that makes its way into technologies that most probably aren’t aware of.

For example, we discussed some of the intellectual property (IP) that HP has had a hand in developing, and has licensed to manufacturers to be included in their products. As an example we discussed a series of network adapters made by a variety of hardware vendors that include some HP IP in their design. These adapters are sold in systems from just about every vendor, and are fully functional network adapters that have the same basic performance specs across the board. However, because HP participated in the development of the technology, there are some functions that are only available if that technology is in an HP product. So you take two different servers, one from HP and the other from another vendor, and both have the exact same NIC in them. The core functionality of the network interface is exactly the same on both systems, but the HP system could have capabilities that don’t show up at all on the other vendor’s system. Abilities such as being able to eliminate extraneous cabling by controlling data flow at the core level of the NIC itself. I asked Gregg about other examples of these core hardware differences, and while some of the details are out there in individual white papers, there isn’t a list that points out the differences across the hardware spectrum.

As a follow-up to this discussion, HP has presented us with an opportunity to participate in a Q&A session with their ProLiant G6 folks, and we would like to get some participation from you, our readers. So if there’s anything that you’ve ever wanted to know about the HP ProLiant G6 line, or any suggestions or concerns that you feel should be addressed, please feel free to submit them here. HP will collect your submissions and they could make it into an upcoming interview and blog series that HP plans to kick off soon.

HP Superdome Tech Day: Superdome in an adaptive infrastructure demo

October 8th, 2009 at 7:56 PM No Comments Shane Pitman

Earlier this week we joined several other sites at HP’s Cupertino, California campus for HP’s Superdome Tech Day. One of the scheduled events focused on some of the configuration and management of an HP Superdome solution in an adaptive infrastructure. HP solutions architect Richard Warham took us through several scenarios including how to rapidly scale up an application server in the event of a sudden surge in transaction volumes, and how to maintain service availability in the event of a server failure.

[flv:http://www.iseetechpeople.com/old/SuperdomeDemo.flv 560 373]

HP Superdome Tech Day – 10 years in mission critical enterprise

October 5th, 2009 at 1:47 PM 1 Comment Shane Pitman

HP Superdome, the name “Superdome” alone invokes a sense of something enormous, powerful, and coming from HP, one can only envision a system at the top end of the power and capability scale. In fact, that’s just what the HP Superdome systems aim to be. For the last decade, HP has developed the Superdome platform to provide mission critical solutions for datacenter environments where down time can not only be costly but disastrous. HP Superdome provides the uptime demanded by services like emergency call centers, major financial centers, and online ordering systems, as well as mission critical infrastructures for major corporations around the world.

Over the last decade, HP has developed the Superdome platform to provide mainframe performance and stability. According to a 2008 Dataquest Insight survey, the cost of downtime within large organizations (2,500+ users) has jumped from $40,000 in 2005 as the average cost per hour of downtime of mission critical business systems to $128,000 in 2008, an increase of 120%. These same companies reported that the amount of downtime they had experienced during the 2005-2008 time frame had also increased 69%. With statistics like that, it becomes painfully obvious that IT downtime downtime directly affects the bottom line. Throughout the growth of the HP Superdome platform, features like redundant cell board components, double chip spare memory, and hot swap I/O have been developed to provide resiliency and to prevent downtime, all with the goal of providing near perfect availability.

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HP StorageWorks Tech Day 2009, Day 1 includes HP Total Care expansion announcements

September 29th, 2009 at 10:08 AM 1 Comment Shane Pitman

During their StorageWorks Tech Day 2009 event being held in Colorado, HP announced the details of several new additions that expand the HP Total Care solution line. HP Total Care provides a host of resources offered by HP Authorized Partners, and includes services, tips and tools such as financing, drivers & downloads, free online classes, support, and recycling, all focused on promoting growth and management resources to SMB’s.

“By investing in new IT solutions now, SMBs will be in a stronger position to seize growth opportunities and thrive as the economy rebounds,” said Kathy Chou, vice president, Worldwide Small and Midsize Business Strategy, HP. “With today’s announcement, HP continues to enrich its Total Care offerings to meet the evolving needs of our SMB customers.”

“AMI has surveyed thousands of SMBs in over a dozen countries over the last four quarters, and noted that the current economy has greatly changed the way they purchase technology products and services,” said Anil Miglani, senior vice president, AMI-Partners. “As we exit the global recession, SMBs will try to protect their existing technology investments while making new investments to grow their business and strengthen customer relationships. HP is well-prepared to help SMB customers achieve this balanced growth through its comprehensive Total Care portfolio.”

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New business desktop PC portfolio announced by HP

September 15th, 2009 at 9:32 AM 1 Comment Don Smith

HP today introduced the HP Compaq 6000 Pro and HP Compaq 6005 Pro desktop PC portfolio for businesses ranging from mid market, education and healthcare customers to corporate enterprises.

The portfolio offers proven technology, flexible productivity tools and security features that are easy to deploy and manage.

“HP continues to see strong and steady customer demand for reliable, secure and full-featured desktop PCs,” said Alan Reed, vice president and general manager, Desktop PCs, HP. “Featuring the right blend of productivity and manageability solutions, the HP Compaq 6000 Pro and HP Compaq 6005 Pro desktop PCs offer businesses the essential PC security, reliability and energy efficiency they need at a competitive price.”

The series features an array of energy-saving components to help businesses monitor and reduce energy use. Both models are EPEAT® Gold registered⁽²⁾and offer an optional⁽³⁾ 89 percent efficient power supply – the highest percentage of power savings HP offers on its desktop PCs – which helps lower energy consumption and costs. HP Power Manager software maximizes energy savings, default S3 sleep settings conserve power after periods of inactivity, and a holistic thermal design enables these PCs to last longer.

Both models include two independent audio streams that allow Voice over IP (VoIP)⁽⁴⁾calls to be routed to the headset while restricting other audio playback to PC speakers.

Featuring a new industrial design with a sleek black, modern chassis with silver accents, the HP Compaq Pro series boasts a 12 month-plus product lifecycle and global SKUs to meet global business deployment needs. Available in a traditional microtower for expandability or the space saving small form factor, the series also features internal and external bays for removable media options or a second hard drive, and PCIe slots to expand capabilities. Simplified serviceability is a snap with a new, simplified tool-less hood removal, quick release latches, and color-coded connectors and wires. HP will also be the one of the first in the industry to offer 100 percent recycled single packaging expanded polyethylene (EPE) cushions across the 6000 Pro series, available in NA and LA.

HP Compaq 6000 Pro Desktop PC
The HP Compaq 6000 Pro now offers integrated dual-monitor capability and improved video and 3D graphics support with Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500, which enables integrated graphics with Microsoft® DirectX-10 support.⁽⁵⁾ High-definition multi-streaming and four-channel audio with echo-cancellation features provide rich sound quality with increased audio flexibility, performance and noise reduction. DDR3 SDRAM memory technology provides higher bandwidth and performance while using less power.

Equipped with a choice of Intel® processors⁽⁶⁾ and the Intel Q43 express chipset, the HP Compaq 6000 Pro desktop provides solid computing for businesses that need flexible management capabilities for office and remote workers. Integrated Intel Standard Manageability enables remote PC access so IT departments can quickly identify and resolve issues. The Intel Stable Image Platform Program helps reduce costs by providing components that support a standardized, common and stable software image across the series.

HP Compaq 6005 Pro Desktop PC
New HP RapidDrive technology, which pairs a solid state drive and regular serial ATA hard drive, is an optional⁽⁷⁾ configuration on the HP Compaq 6005 Pro that provides customers with quicker boot-up and response times with extended storage capability. High-end features such as integrated dual-display capability and DDR3 memory raise productivity while optional⁽³⁾ RAID technology with data mirroring minimizes disruptions and protects critical business documents.

The HP Compaq 6005 features integrated DASH 1.1 for expedited remote access to security patches, troubleshooting, and automated system startup and shutdown. All HP Compaq 6005 Pro PC configurations are ENERGY STAR®5.0 qualified, and a new integrated sideport memory interface helps reduce system power. Businesses will appreciate that the HP Compaq 6005 Pro PC idle quad core processor power measurements show an average of 25 percent improvement over the current HP Compaq dc5850 PC. In addition, a solenoid hood lock and sensor help protect the unit from theft or tampering.

AMD Business Class technology and the new AMD 785G chipset along with Athlon™ II Dual Core and Phenom™ II Dual/Triple/Quad Core processors⁽⁷⁾ provide stability with exceptional multi-tasking processing power and an excellent integrated graphics experience which supports Microsoft DirectX-10.1.

For more information, please visit HP.com

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