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HP Cloud advisors

Wednesday, August 31, 2011 Category : , 0

Got invited to a panel at VMworld of HP CTO and Cloud advisor, thanks Calvin. I was not sure what to expect or what they would say but it sounded like fun, I love a bit of cloud talk.

Here are the notes I took. They might be easy to get out of context so post in comments if I got anything wrong. The room was noisy and it was very hard to hear.

I was impressed by some of the good analogies that the guys used in answering the questions. Especially the one that al the server vendors have access to the same components and tech but some vendors servers are better than others. That's a good insight not only for HP but for all of us, it's what you do with what you have that counts.

Also you have to like a bunch of guys who wear lab coats!


Q. HP and openstack.



A. We are the number one partner with VMware and Microsoft and others and we do that by partnering well. We are involved in the open stack initiative and helping that community. Of course VMware offer their software on other hardware. Each of the hypervisor environments have different value propositions.

Q.is HP going to develop software for object storage?

A. No.

Q. Integration with different Cloud providers but what about with different Hypervisors.

A. today we support VMware and HyperV plus ( missed )

A. How will HP store my apps

Q. Cloud storage today has generally been for static data. Cloud 1.0. The change we are going to see and difference is going to come from solid state devices which have different characteristics. Apps are going to get faster. As storage moves into the server layer then it can get faster and in the cloud we will be able to provide apps for non static data.

Q. How will you reduce the cost of SSD.

A. Volume, volume, volume and that is what HP does well. Research on new things like memrister might change SSD, but it's five years out from changing things.

Q. How will HP differentiate themselves from other Cloud providers.

A. You can take a pile of parts and throw them together to build a Cloud but performance sucks. HP can provide and integrated solution that does network, storage, servers plus the software. One vendor. This is part of our value prop. It's the applications which create value, not the blinking lights. HP has industry knowledge and can assist with the business process too. You have this flexibility when working with HP. Look at servers, the vendors all have access to the same components, it's how they are put together that adds value, that's what HP can do for Cloud. Just deploying a virtual machine is such a small part of what's required.

Q. Will HP stand up it's own Cloud?

A. We are already a public cloud provider in the apps space and will continue to do so. ( missed name of this service ) HP can't own the industry on this, it's to big so we will work with others and do things to. For example we work with a pile of hosters are msps and HP is a large msp, we are used to this.

Q. With the ease of provisioning in the cloud what safeguards will be in place from doing stupid things.

A. Sounds like how the unix guys used to talk about the windows guys. It's hard to get it down to being simple but nothing is going to be fool proof. What we do is based around policy models and rules which can provide many safe guards. Because of the soup to nuts elements HP can make things easier.

Q. What comes after cloud? Are the models of hybrid etc all there is? Will everything move to the Internet?

A. we have an abundance of data from these news sensors, an abundance of compute and lots of networking to move it around. Attention span has not changed. Analyzing and making sense of all this through these resources is what comes next. Jobs will evolve and we will not be mucking around with some of the primitives we do today. Just like a pilot is having their job automated, getting attention of the pilot is important and we will see lots of research on this as computer technology becomes more automated.
It's going to take a very long time for things to move to the cloud, there is a lot still to do, yes technology will change

.

Stack Wars

Thursday, April 22, 2010 Category : , , , , , , 0

Stephen Foskett (http://blog.fosketts.net/ @SFoskett) has started a series over at GestaltIT on the Stack Wars topic. Stephen reached out to a few people in the blog space to see what they thought. I thought his questions were really interesting so gave it some thought (okay it was only enough thought that could be done on a bus trip to work).


To the questions.

Why is this happening?

I think a number of factors have lead to the "stack" or the return to the mainframe model.

One of these is virtualisation. Virtualisation has in many ways collapsed the different components of compute, networking and storage into a blob where differences in each individual layer are diminished. The layers are abstracted away through the hardware independence and it starts to make sense to obtain an entire "virtualisation" machine rather than build it from scratch each time.

Likewise the continue performance improvements means that these more generic solutions can solve a might greater scope of workload than ever before. Certainly the advancement in hardware processing capacity has outpaced softwares ability to consume it.

The second element is the change in behaviour of the vendors. The vendors are much more willing to get in front and sell to end users these days. Even those vendors who are so channel focused do this. I remember 10 years ago in the integration space; it was only the top of town that could get a sales person or a system engineer from a vendor to visit and flaunt their wares. These days, if you are a fish and chip shop you could probably get a vendor to turn up for a presentation and a proof of concept.

However the vendors are realising what the system integrators learnt a long time ago, there is money to be made by combining all the parts and providing a whole solution. Plus the cost of sale can drop if you can have a few packages that fit most sales, rather than doing everything as customised solutions.

The vendors have realised that by using virtualisation and stacks they can make larger sales whilst reducing their cost of sales whilst targeting an increase number of opportunities.

Is this good for end-users?

It is probably a little early to see how the benefits for end users will pan out. If we learn from history the mainframe era certainly had its drawbacks for many organisations towards the end.

There are certainly some up sides for the end users. Improved levels of support and integration can't be bad. Certainly lower costs by removing lots of customised design work and through economies of scale is going to be a benefit.

But there will be drawbacks too. I don't think anyone has been thinking or talking about the lifecycle of these stacks. Will you have to replace the entire stack each time at end of life to keep your support? What if you are happy with your compute and storage but have brought in a new networking fabric that is much faster, do you have to throw the baby out with the bathwater?

Where are IBM and Dell?

My hunch is that IBM and especially Dell are in the wings waiting to see how things pan out. Let the early adopters play and make the market, see where the success and failures are. Once they have learned from all of their mistakes they can swing in bringing in their existing value propositions. They don't want to leave it very long but we are still in the incubation period for the stacks.

I think Dell is the one to watch here rather than IBM. After all they have been essentially doing this today in the lower end of town. They have the parts to bring it together and they can suck the bottom tier right out of the market from under everyone else.

Of course HP is the other one to watch very carefully, especially now that 3Com is on board.

What about the smaller players?

If the stacks take off the smaller players are going to continue to do what they have always done, value add. Many elements of technology have turned to commodity. Remember the days when you would always pay people to come in and do Exchange deployments. Remember how hard it was to maintain Unified Communications solutions. Over time the technologies became utility enough that organisations could do these themselves.

Smaller players, whether they be systems integrators or vendors will continue to find those niche requirements and the hard projects or problems that will always be around. Our consumption of technology is growing not shrinking, the small players will continue to deliver and support the early adoption technologies.

What does this do to innovation?

Many people in IT need to understand that we are in a young industry which is starting to mature. A lot of stuff really is going to become utility and standardised, thats the way industries evolve. Yet innovation still continues in mature industries.

What about cloud?

Bingo, we can't talk about anything with mentioning Cloud. Are the stacks the vendors means of abating the move of all of the revenue to a handful of global cloud providers. Build an internal Cloud with our stack please so we can keep making some money off you.

I see the stacks working well with the Cloud, certainly the IaaS and PaaS based ones. Improved standards adoption will allow the federation and creation of meta Clouds. So there is still a place for internal work loads (there is some good thinking on this that uses the commercial property market or food production analogies).

What I DO predict we will see is the vendors offering the stacks to Enterprises is Cloud based service models for internal use. How do people consume photocopiers and printers today, they pay per page. The vendor puts in the equipment, maintains it and supplies it, you just pay for what you use. In the future we are going to see this model start to appear more in IT, once you have a utility stack, this can successfully be achieved for the vendor and the Enterprise. By the way virtualisation is the key enabler here, abstracting away all the hardware from the workloads.

Is this the ultimate form of IT infrastructure?

The word "ultimate" makes it sound like the most amazing. No, I don't think its going to be the ultimate. I think the stacks might become the boring utilities they they are meant to be. A standardised, reliable, cost effective computing block thats does what it is tasked to do, no more and no less. Its the IT version of the multi-function photocopier. Roll them in and roll them out. The stacks are more about an operational model than speeds, feeds, dials and knobs.


Well there you have it, thats enough for me to come up with on a bus trip. Be keen to hear your thoughts, post in the comments.

Rodos

HP on Virtualisation

Tuesday, March 30, 2010 Category : , 1

Today was spent at HP Storage Tech Day (http://www.hp.com/go/techday2010) at HP in Houston, TX.

One of the speakers was Mike Koponen who is the HP Solutions Marketing Manager for Virtualisation. I guess you could possibly think of Mike as the HP version of Chad or Vaughn. In his role Mike covers relationships and guiding the go to market activities around VMware, Microsoft and Citrix.

Here is a video interview with Mike where I asked about their strategy.



Some more details from the events today regarding HP and VMware.

Today HP detailed the release of the vCenter Plugin for MSA, P4000, EVA and XP arrays, which enables you to see the underling storage configuration and attributes from within vCenter. We noticed in the later demo this is a read only view you, it is not possible to make any changes from within the plugin. This is a free tool. It may also be used with HP Insight Control Integration for servers so you can see from with vCenter both server and storage details from a single pane. Insight Control is a licensed element though. There is no documentation up yet and we are waiting for the slide deck so we will need to wait a little bit to dig into the details of the features. But this is good news for HP customers, who I think have been waiting a while for this level of integration.

During the talk there was numerous references to the reference architectures which HP have in relation to building out the stack, "solution blocks". However we don't hear a lot from HP about these, certainly not like the hype around the vBlock Reference Architectures or the Netapp Secure Multi-Tennant Reference Architecture.

Its interesting to remember that HP's relationship goes all the way to the OEM level which gives them a different relationship, which was quoted as "access and opportunities for collaboration and co-development". In was stated that HP is VMwares largest OEM partner.

Lastly an interesting statistic, for customers who are going to make server purchases over the next 12 months, 57% of those x86 servers will have virtualisation on them.

So here is my take. I think HP have a lot more to say or engage with about virtualisation and VMware in particular, the thing is they are just so quiet about it no one really knows. The other vendors do a great job about making sure the community of partners and end-users know all about their integration and features, so thats what people talk about. HP, if you do have lots of great information, functionality and support then do yourself and your customers a big favour and get out there and start engaging with the community where they are at.

Rodos

HP Storage Day Agenda

Saturday, March 27, 2010 Category : , 0

HP have put up a page with all the resources for Storage Day, www.hp.com/go/techday2010.


The agenda is now listed. Looks like some interesting sessions. Interesting that there is a customer presentation, whats that about? Some EVA and some scale out NAS (X9000). I notice that Chris Evans (@chrismevans) has already done a writeup on the P2000 and P4000 so I will have to ensure I read that and talk to Chris before those sessions.

I hear they are giving away some storage at the Tweetup on Monday night, so if you are in town, come and join us!


Agenda March 29-30, 2010

Monday March 29 - all times are CDT - Central Daylight Time
8:00am - 8:30amLobbySessions begin in Commons, room: Ontario South
8:30am - 9:00amIntroductionCalvin Zito, Kyle Fitze, Thomas Rush
9:00am - 10:00amSession 1Opening Session: Storage and Converged Infrastructure: Tom Joyce
10:00am - 11:15amSession 2Storage technology and Converged Infrastructure: Paul Perez, VP and Chief Technologist, StorageWorks Division
11:15am - 11:30amBreak
11:30am - 12:00pmSession 3Customer presentation
12:00pm - 1:00pmLunchLuby's
1:00pm - 1:30pmSession 4The market is coming to HP: Andrew Manners, Marketing StorageWorks
1:30pm - 2:00pmSession 5Solutions: Ian Selway, Mike Koponen
2:00pm - 2:15pmBreak(Move to M4.2-311)
2:15pm - 2:55pmSession 6EVA Update and demo: Kyle Fitze, Director Storage Platform
2:55pm - 3:35pmSession 7X9000 Overview and demo: Efren Molina
3:35pm - 4:15pmSession 8What’s new with P2000 and demo: Norman Morales
4:15pm - 4:55pmSession 9What’s new with P4000 and demo: Chris Hornauer
6:00pm - 7:00pmTweet-up!Brix Wine Cellar
http://twtvite.com/HPHouStorage
Please RSVP on Twtvite
Tuesday March 30 - all times are CDT - Central Daylight Time
8:45am - 9:00amLobbySession begins in M4: M4.2.101
9:00am - 9:30amSession 10Previous day recap / Q&A / Transition to Halo
9:30am - 10:15amSession 11ProCurve via Halo (CCM31510 and CCA52416): Lin Nease
10:15am - 10:30amBreak(Move to lab in M4)
10:30am - 12:00pmSWD Lab Tour in M4.2-311Events Lab – Roger Javens; EBS – Phil Lang; MSA – Dave Sheffield
12:00pm -Lunch/EndOffsite lunch, return bloggers to hotel

Well my flight to San Francisco is about to board.

Rodos

HP Storage Tech Day

Wednesday, March 17, 2010 Category : , 0

In a few weeks I will be attending the HP Storage Tech Day in Houston, TX. Thanks to Calvin Zito (@HPStorageGuy / http://www.hp.com/storage/blog) for the invite.


This is a follow on from the one held last year and sits alongside the HP Infrastructure Software and Blade Day which occurred last month. The first event was the imputes for the Gestalt IT Tech Field Days.

The agenda has not been finalised but here is what is currently proposed.
Topics such as:
  • HP Converged Infrastructure, and how HP StorageWorks fits into it
  • Updates on HP’s storage platforms, and
  • How HP is competing with the other major storage vendors
You will hear from HP executives such as Paul Perez – VP and Chief Technologist of HP StorageWorks, Andrew Manners - StorageWorks Marketing VP, and several other key executives. You’ll also see demos of specific HP StorageWorks products as well as have a chance to tour some of the HP StorageWorks facilities.
I have done a bit with HP EVA's in the past and always liked aspects of their technology.

There has been so much going on in the storage world in the last year but I have not heard a lot form HP on storage. The biggest news was David Donatelli moving over from EMC and the subsequent law suit. We have had the rise of VCE and Acadia, Netapp have produced their Secure Multi-Tennant Cloud architecture. On the blade front we have HP bashing heads with Cisco around UCS, after all the now infamous Tolly report came out at the Blade Day.

So whats the strategy ongoing strategy for storage at HP? They went and picked up LeftHand, they picket up Donatelli. At the high end HP they have XP which is OEM'd from Hitachi and we have just seen Oracle drop Hitachi in preference for their new step-child Sun.

I am sure there will be lots of technical speed and feeds which I look forward to, but here are some of the high level questions I hope I can get a feel for as well. If I am thinking about these things then I am sure Enterprise customers are thinking about these as well.
  • Where does the product line sit? The products from Lefthand are great, I think they may have been the first cab off the rank with a VSA. So whats its future and what do we compare it with. Is it the HP competitor to Dell EqualLogic? EVA and XP, where are things at?
  • What about automated storage Tiering, at the sub-LUN level. We know EMC are talking up FAST2, 3PAR are releasing it and Compellent have had it for a while. Whats HP's thoughts on these areas.
  • Stack integrations looks to be the flavour of the month, EMC (with Cisco and VMware) as well as Netapp are pushing it hard. So what is HP's take on integrating their own stacks with blades, Procurve/3Com and Storage.
  • Cloud. If there was another flavour of the month its Cloud. What are HP's thoughts around storage for Cloud, either internal or service provider.
It all starts on Monday the 29th of March. I will be using Twitter and some blog posts to share my thoughts. I am sure there will be many more questions that will come to the surface before then but if you have any particular thing you would like to grill HP about their storage then post in the comments or DM on twitter (@rodos).

Should be some real geek fun.

Rodos

P.S. For the long disclaimer bit. HP will be paying my travel and accommodation expenses for this event. I can and will write what I feel like, good or bad for HP. In my day job I work for a company that is a Partner of just about every vendor. We have a awesome HP BPSA on staff (Rodos waves at Jakes), plus we are a HDS and Netapp partner. We resell UCS and I am bit of a UCS fanboy. It is what it is, this is my personal blog. Wearing two hats keeps my head warm in winter.

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