This is post is a long time coming, but starting a new job will do that :)
I’ve long wanted to attend the Interop tech conference and was able to attend the Las Vegas installation this year by invite from HP/Ivy Worldwide. I was really hoping to make the Mumbai show, but I guess it wasn’t in the budget. It’s primarily a networking focused conference, but with datacenter virtualization technologies converging (you may have heard the term Converged Infrastructure), virtualization admins cannot afford to pass off more complex networking infrastructures to a ‘networking guy’.
One of greatest things about the evolution of the server industry is the (attempt at) engineering out mistakes. You can only go so far to remove the human element in systems administration, but HP’s doing a really good job with the latest release of their Gen8 server line.
The three features I like the most are the CPU Smart Socket Guide, the Do Not Remove light, and the iPDU system (Intelligent power distribution unit – iPDU).
The CPU Smart Socket guide was co-developed with Intel to remove the too common mishap of bending pins on the motherboard when installing a CPU. Here’s a picture of the CPU in the cradle.
The Do Not Remove light comes into effect when disks in a RAID set fail and removing the wrong drive from the server (as you can have many RAID sets) will result in data loss. You can see the indicator in all of it’s glorious action below.
The iPDU kit works best as a combination of 3 pieces – the special power supply in the server, the special iPDU and Insight Control. The whole system working together accurately measures power utilization, maps servers (Gen8 w/ Platinum power supplies) to PDU ports and verifies redundancy. No more outages because you accidentally plugged both power supplies into the same PDU.
Removing human error from the datacenter, especially the large datacenter, will cut down on outages, data loss, unnecessary parts replacements and hair loss. Well, maybe not hair loss (but we can hope).
The old saying is that ‘you can’t fix stupid’. Well, HP hasn’t exactly done that, but they’ve certainly put up bigger warning signs so you’d have to be stupid on purpose.
HP and Intel are hosting bloggers today at their Houston campus to do a deep dive on their new Gen8 server platform. You can watch the live stream at http://www.hp.com/go/gen8bloggers and follow along on twitter with the tags #HPTechday and #Gen8.
This week I’m excited to be flying to Ft. Collins Colorado for an HP Tech Day that will be hosting independent bloggers to take a look at the LeftHand and 3Par products as well as their VMware integration. I’ve been to a couple demos, read a couple papers and have had some conversations with people about these products, so what makes this trip special is that we get some good ol’ fashion hands-on-lab experience. There’s a chasm of a difference between seeing the product in a slide deck and being able to kick the tires yourself.
I’m also excited to meet a group of new bloggers/storage-geeks. I’ve met a few of the guys at different events (Tech Field Day, VMWorld, Hp Cloud Tech Day, etc.) and on twitter and I’m excited to meet the rest:
The crew will be hosted by HP Storage Guru and all around good guy Calvin Zito (@HPStorageGuy).
As is all the rage for conferences and other intimate gatherings, a live stream of the event will be attempted. Keep an eye out on twitter for the hash tag #HPTechDay and/or #HPCI for the latest information and buzz about the event.
I had the privilege of attending an HP Cloud Tech Day this past week in Houston, organized by Ivy Communications. Tom, Chris and Halley did a great job gathering some pretty cool and smart bloggers and thinkers to hear about and give feedback on HP’s cloud offerings and aspirations. The list of attendees were:
I highly recommend you check out their stuff. Super smart guys. A great mix, too, of sys admins, cloud evangelists, service providers, etc. I’ll follow up with some specific posts about the topics we covered while I was there, but here’s what we covered in day 1: HP Enterprise Business Cloud Strategy, HP View of Cloud Futures, Hyperscale for Cloud, Inner Workings and Building of a CloudSystem Infrastructure, Performance Optimized Datacenter Overview and Tour. Overall I was quite impressed. My regret is that I could only attend one full day. I will be following the rest of the action on Twitter (hash tag #hpci) and on www.hp.com/go/hpcloudday (live video, twitter feed and chat).
