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HP

HP Officejet Pro X: The serious inkjet for business

by Philip Sellers September 18, 2013

written by Philip Sellers

OfficjetProX

Inkjet printers are the predominant type of printers used in homes because of their low price, the low price of their ink and the versatility – handling color print jobs, photos and business prints with ease. And while inkjet became king of the home, laser printers became king of the enterprise. In the office, laser became the ideal choice because it offered better durability, color quality, speed and they could handle the larger workloads that the enterprise demand.

HP is attempting to break that stigma against inkjet in the office with the Officejet Pro X, a new business class inkjet printer that can print up to 70 pages per minute with a cost of about 1.3 cents per page. The Officejet Pro X features several differences that set it apart from traditional inkjet printers and make it better suited for an office environment.

Page-wide printhead

The first difference is a new innovation from HP. It is known as PageWide technology and it involves a new printhead that is the same width as the paper featuring jets all the way across, which help the new line of printer achieve its up to 70 pages per minute in general office mode and up to 42 pages per minute in professional mode, which is higher quality. And keep in mind, these are page per minute counts in full color – beating out many laser printers in terms of pages per minute. The page-wide printhead features 42,240 nozzles each dropping ink on a precise section of the page. The array provides a 1,200 nozzles-per-inch native resolution.

I can’t call the second point an innovation, the second thing that also sets Officejet Pro X apart from other ink printers is pigmented ink. Traditional inkjet inks use dyes for colorant, where Laserjet toner uses pigment for coloring. The pigment allows for richer color and better durability. Pigment inks from the Officejet Pro X offer the same benefits. The final prints for these printers offer smear resistant prints whose ink doesn’t smear under a highlighter or run if water is spilled onto the page.

Larger ink cartridges

The third change is much larger ink wells, which are better suited for the volume of an office. Each set of XL color ink cartridge is rated for approximately 6,600 pages of life and the XL black cartridge is rated for 9,200 pages. Clearly, these aren’t the print wells you’ve seen before. They are massively larger and retailing for around $150 each.

The last major difference is the thermal system found in the Officejet Pro X – a feature usually reserved for laser printers. This compared with the pigmented ink allow for crisp and dry prints the instant that they emerge from the printer. Inkjets typically pause between pages of heavy color to allow drying time, but this is not necessary with the Officejet Pro X. It cuts through printing quickly and efficiently.

But you don’t just have to take my word for it. When I attended HP Discover in June, I was able to get a demo of the Officejet Pro X from Jamie Houser, HP Future Product Manager and Managed Solutions within HP’s Printers and Personal Systems group. I took a video of the demonstration:

Houser says the printer is targeted to business workgroups. So how does it compare to the Laserjet Pro 400 – a comparably priced laser printer for workgroups? The Officejet Pro X bests the Laserjet in terms of pages per minute, doubling the Laserjet Pro 400’s 21 ppm in professional mode. In general mode, it more than triples the pages per minute. In terms of print quality, these two were side by side on the HP show floor and the prints were identical. I could not discern which print came from which. In terms of monthly print volume, the Laserjet Pro 400 is rated for up to 40,000 pages per month versus Officejet Pro X’s 50,000 pages per month. In terms of consumables, the ink prices are slightly higher for the Officejet Pro X, but each XL cartridge is rated for 50% more pages than the Laserjet Pro 400’s toner cartridge.

For more information, visit www.hp.com/go/officejetprox.

September 18, 2013 0 comments

HP shares Big Data directions

by Philip Sellers September 16, 2013

written by Philip Sellers

bigdatalarge A couple weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend a Big Data briefing from HP Chief Technologist for Data Management, Greg Battas. Battas is part of the newly formed Converged Systems group in HP. He was a pioneer of Very Large Databases (VLDBs) and analytics in the telecom industry who has worked in business intelligence and analytics for a couple decades. He speaks internationally on topics of data integration and holds several patents in the areas of Relations Database, parallel query optimization and real time infrastructure architectures.

Coming from a mid market company, Big Data seems like a problem that doesn’t affect me. Its a concept I have a difficult time wrapping my head around, and for that reason, I’ve not written about it in the past. But it seems that Big Data is more than just a buzzword of the year and there is a lot of innovation occurring around Big Data in attempts to solve customer problems with these datasets.

So, what is Big Data? Wikipedia seems to sum it up best by saying “Big data is the term for a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications.” That helps.

So within the realm of Big Data, you begin to think about supercomputers, hyper-scale arrays of servers and new innovations like in-memory databases. So where is this going and what’s happening in Big Data today?

Direction: Consolidation of Clusters

Big Data Architectures in the past were based around very simple servers with direct attached storage. It leads to a first Hadoop cluster, then a second, third and fourth. A lot of the thought in Big Data was movement away from proprietary storage and databases with parallel programming and distributed file systems like Google File System on standard hardware. Common wisdom dictates that big data depends on massive IO to read huge amounts of data from disk and to optimize this you move compute closer to the data to reduce overhead. There are certain operations that benefit from being pushed down to the same location as the data.

In reality, what has been learned from Big Data workloads is that only a portion of the processing can be close to the data. Keeping data and compute local to one another is actually difficult and does not always result in optimal performance because the data may not be in the appropriate form for processing and may need to be shuffled or reduced. In addition, its observed that the majority of CPU power is still needed for analytics and aggregation. And when most work is done in-memory, the storage really doesn’t apply. This becomes particularly important with NVRAM and other persistent RAM technologies in the future. What all this allows is for the consolidation and re-tasking of clusters to meet multiple needs.

Direction: Software Defined Storage

Big Data workloads, particularly the largest datasets in the world, are running on distributed file systems on industry standard server hardware. These are parallel file systems rather than traditional storage arrays or databases. Hadoop Distributed File System is becoming a very common interface across multiple platforms and deployments and vendors are adopting HDFS and integrating it under their technologies. Today, there is a mix of proprietary and open source technologies.

HP is observing a lot of vendors running their proprietary systems on top of the HDFS, or a very similar parallel filesystem. HP’s internal blueprint with HAVEn is much the same. HAVEn has the unstructured data of Autonomy, the structured analytics of Vertica and running it on top of the HDFS. In addition to storage, the HDFS allows for data to be passed from one tool to another.

Direction: NoSQL is being adopted by a lot of software partners

The first wave of Big Data was around Batch where Hadoop was used for analytics and ETL offloading. It was often coupled with a company’s SQL databases. There is a growing interest in NoSQL products from independent software vendors because of a large dependence on the traditional database vendors. ISVs are seeing a large portion of their total sales being directed back to a database vendor at the close of a sale, so many are beginning to move their commercial products onto NoSQL products that do not require the large costs. It isn’t without challenges, since there is no longer a SQL interface or transaction management to move onto a NoSQL product that no longer requires the large costs of traditional databases. But there are several with active projects porting their products onto a NoSQL product like Hbase.

Direction: Shift to optimized hardware

With a specialized workload like Big Data, there is opportunity for tuning and tailoring hardware to specifically handle the work better than industry standard hardware. Within HP, Moonshot is one example of hardware that is hyper-scale, simple node architecture suited for Big Data (I previously covered Moonshot here). On each cartidge, co-processors or GPU’s could be added to better handle big data workloads, but there is even possibilities within the system-on-a-chip on the cartridge.

Battas mentioned the idea of Dark Silicon, or un-used and un-powered transistors within today’s chips. Today, the industry has the capability of packing on more transistors into a piece of silicon than we have connections to power, leaving them dark. But the interesting idea is tailoring the dark silicon cores to handle a specific task well and then rotating the customized core in and out of use to increase efficiency. This is a particularly interesting topic, enough so that I have written a second post today about dark silicon.

September 16, 2013 0 comments

Compute Datacenter Trends

HP and chipmakers exploring use of specialized dark silicon for improved performance and efficiency

by Philip Sellers September 16, 2013

written by Philip Sellers

I love when a briefing or conference call sends me searching for a new term I don’t recognize. I had that happen during an HP briefing with Greg Battas about Big Data last month. It was the first time I had heard of the concept of Dark Silicon, where there are more transistors on a chip than can be powered leaving some of them dark. To me, it sounded a lot like dark fiber – fiber laid in the ground but unlit because there is no use for it at the time.

When I began digging into Dark Silicon, there were relatively few sites with any information about it. Most sites that referred to Dark Silicon were from 2010 and 2011 and were referring to the pace as which chip makers can pack transistors on a chip was quickly outpacing the ability to keep them powered. Also, as the ability to pack more transistors increases, the size of the process stays about the same, leading to more and more cores being present in the same space. In many cases, the 4 and 8-core chips common in systems today physically have more cores on them, but cannot be powered. But at the same time, the cost of omitting these transistors is negligible for the manufacturer.

From the conference call I was on, Battas relayed to us that some interesting things are happening particularly in system on a chip designs. These applications are particularly power sensitive in mobile devices leaving more dark silicon in these devices. But the emerging idea is that instead of simply leaving the additional cores dark, these could be engineered for specific tasks and powered only when needed to improve the efficiency of a task.

Specialized Cores

I was able to find a great resource on the topic – a presentation titled “Is Dark Silicon Useful” from Michael B. Taylor, an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego. The presentation has a good general explanation of dark silicon and it details the topic that Battas mentioned on the call in more detail. The slide deck is available online and I suggest that you take a look at page 40 and beyond in particular.

The slide on page 43 is extremely interesting showing a 91% savings of energy through using conservation cores – which were specialty dark silicon cores tuned for a specific task, rather than traditional RISC based processing. One of the two insights that Taylor shares about conservation cores is that “specialized logic can improve energy efficiency by 10-1000x.” That’s pretty compelling.

In terms of HP and Big Data

In April, HP launched Moonshot for the world. Moonshot is a hyperscale, datacenter solution that uses server cartridges to massive scale out software. The cartridge (think blade, but more simplistic) includes all the workings of a server while offloading the power, cooling and networking to the enclosure.

After a couple briefings that have mentioned Moonshot, a few things become clear. First, Moonshot cartridges can be introduced on short, iterative cycles allowing for faster innovation and integration of the latest technologies. Second, the cartridges can be customized to perform specific tasks. One of the early briefings mentioned creating a cartridge GPU’s integrated on the board to handle facial recognition at ATMs. There is unique flexibility in that design.

Now bringing in the idea of dark silicon on Moonshot cartridges, designers and engineers are thinking that creating silicon specifically tuned to certain processes that can turn on and turn off regions as needed will improve efficiency even further with these system on a chip designs in the datacenter. There are applications like voice service processors which can greatly benefit of custom silicon.

“Because adding transistors to an existing piece of silicon is really cost effective, it lowers the barrier for putting really interesting acceleration onto the chip for databases,” according to Battas. HP really sees a lot of this innovation occurring from system on a chip vendors who are looking at applications for database accelleration. This could have large impacts in scale out architectures like Hadoop clusters and other Big Data applications.

In addition to the chip innovations, big data software is changing also as open source alternatives to the traditional big data software. This speeds adoption of new hardware innovations into the software is accelerated and this allows for new concepts to be rapidly adopted into platforms. For instance, Intel is working closely with the Apache Hadoop project to make sure that the software can take advantage of their hardware. Battas expects to see close collaboration by other big data software vendors and hardware vendors to try and exploit these types of increased performance with specialized hardware.

September 16, 2013 1 comment

Virtualization

HP Virtual Performance Viewer offers heat map for virtual performance

by Philip Sellers September 11, 2013

written by Philip Sellers

A couple weeks ago at VMworld, I stopped by the HP booth to see what they had new for this year and I was introduced to HP Virtualization Performance Viewer (vPV). Presented as a virtual triage tool, the idea behind vPV is to quickly let a virtualization administrator identify host spots of CPU or Memory that deviate from their baseline so they can pinpoint and fix problems quickly.

vPV comes in two editions – a free edition supporting up to 200 VM objects and a paid for edition with no limit.

The interface is clean and shows an overview of the entire environment, color coded – with shades of greens being good and oranges and red representing the problem areas. What is even better is you are able to drill down into a specific host or VM by double clicking one of the blocks. Drill down is simple and acts as it should, filtering the results to a specific cluster, resource pool, datastore or host to view what is happening inside of that object. This provides quick information about why a particular object is deviating from its norm.

A simple toggle radio button on the right side allows users to switch between vSphere and Hyper-V in the interface.

Screenshot of the HP Virtualization Performance Viewer dashboard — click for larger image

Hypervisor Support

vPV documentation says the system supports both VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM and Xen hypervisors. In addition, it supports OpenStack OS in a private cloud deployment and HP Cloud Application Platform as a Service (Paas).

In the free edition that I downloaded, I was able to see where I could configure against VMware vCenter or Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, but not against the other hypervisors or hosts listed. vCenter requires no agent. For Hyper-V, it appears SCVMM is required and to communicate with SCVMM an additional data collector must be installed. I did not see a requirement for SCVMM in the documentation, however.

HP is very big on the message of customer choice and support across heterogeneous virtualized environments. This is another product supporting the message, in my opinion.

Installation

HP documentation says that deployment should take about 15 minutes and I found that to be true. vPV is packaged as a virtual appliance, so the installation into VMware was quick and simple from an OVA template. After spinning up the OVA, configuration against vCenter was simple, too, except I had too many VM objects for the free edition and so vPV presented an error. I was able to begin testing against a subset of VMs by creating a special username and limiting permissions to specific hosts, so the free tool can be useful even in a larger environment against a subset of virtual guests.

Free versus Licensed

The free edition of vPV does not provide any security for the application. If you can get the URL for your browser, you are in and able to make configuration changes. The licensed edition includes AD integration and password protection for the application. The licensed edition also includes 3 months of data retention, while the free version only includes 1 day.

Integration

The licensed version of vPV has integration points against other HP management software packages – HP Performance Manager and HP Business Software Manager (BSM).

Support

For the free edition, community support is available from an HP support forum.

Video Overview – How to install vPV in under 15 minutes

More Information

September 11, 2013 0 comments

Datacenter Storage

vSphere 5.5 introduces new, simpler UNMAP command

by Philip Sellers August 26, 2013

written by Philip Sellers

Welcome news for anyone using array-based thin provisioning with vSphere, VMware has introduced a new and simpler UNMAP command that can be invoke from esxcli with vSphere Platform 5.5. This will help 3PAR customers more easily perform the UNMAP process to free space on LUNs so that the array can discover and free the space on the back-end. This is a big deal for any thin-provisioned LUNs in a vSphere environment. In addition to an easier way to invoke the UNMAP, VMware has also made changes in how the UNMAP occurs on the array.

According to VMware’s What’s New document, the previous method of creating a temporary file and then informs the array the the blocks in the temporary file can be reclaimed. In the case of the 3PAR, the zero detect process then runs to identify the free space and reclaim it. With version 5.5, the reclaim allows the administrator to specify the size in blocks rather than a percentage and now the dad space can be reclaimed in increments instead of all at once – to help shops that experience performance degradation with the old method.

The new command is run from esxcli, logically under storage and VMFS.

[code]esxcli storage vmfs unmap[/code]

The full syntax of the command is not clear yet and I’ll have to wait for my 5.5 upgrade to test or get more details.

The fact that the new UNMAP is run from esxcli makes me hopeful that I will be able to script and schedule the UNMAP to occur during non-peak hours when the maintenance would not be service affecting.

What is UNMAP and what does it do? See this post for more information.

August 26, 2013 1 comment

Datacenter Storage Virtualization

Keeping VMFS datastores thin on 3PAR StoreServ

by Philip Sellers July 31, 2013

written by Philip Sellers

Earlier this year, I moved a large part of my infrastructure onto HP’s 3PAR StoreServ 7400. As promised, our initial migration netted us over 50% savings through the thin technologies baked into the 3PAR StoreServ platform. But one my biggest concerns was how well could 3PAR maintain its lean status over months of operation with my vSphere running there. (Looking for how to free space on 3PAR, jump down to 2 Commands to Reclaim section below.)

After several months of running on 3PAR, I can report that it does a noble job identifying and thinning the storage under my vSphere environment. But, its not perfect. 3PAR can only identify what’s truly zeroed and on a VMFS5 datastore, that equates to space that has not been utilized. vSphere doesn’t clean up its VMFS datastore in vSphere 5.1. And this behavior has nothing to do with 3PAR.

History of Space Reclamation in vSphere

With vSphere 5, VMware introduced a new primitive using the SCSI UNMAP command to its VMware APIs for Array Integration (VAAI). Billed as VMware’s Block Space Reclamation feature, it allowed vSphere to communicate with the storage array and identify which space was no longer occupied by a VM and could be reclaimed. VMware shipped vSphere 5 with the EnableBlockDelete advanced storage feature enabled by default.

Unfortunately, the Block Space Reclamation feature induced overhead on the arrays and caused varying performance impacts on systems, in some cases causing severe performance degradation. Ultimately, VMware decided to disable the EnableBlockDelete advanced feature by default and disabled is the recommendation for production environments. Fast forward to vSphere 5.1 and VMware has not reversed its recommendation.

So where does that leave customers with bloated filesystems? The good news is that you can run a manual UNMAP using the vmkfstools command on a particular LUN. Effectively, the manual UNMAP writes a large balloon file on the filesystem which is used to zero out the space that was previously occupied so that the storage array can identify it as free space.

On 3PAR, once the vmkfstools command is run, 3PAR then begins its discovery of freespace through the Zero Detect feature and over the next several hours will begin reporting true free space.

2 Commands to Reclaim

The command is easy for initiating an UNMAP in vSphere. But, you have to do a bit of prep work. UNMAP is supported with 3PAR StoreServ arrays running HP 3PAR OS 3.1.1 or later. See VMware KB article 2014849 for the details on how to confirm to determine support for other arrays.

You will need to enable SSH on the ESXi 5.0 or 5.1 host.
To do so, go to the Host and Clusters view in vSphere Client, choose the host from the tree on the left side, choose the Configuration tab in the right side, choose Security Profile under the Software section, then click Properties… under the Services section. Scroll down to find SSH, double-click and then start the service. ESXi will display a warning that SSH is enabled. When you complete running your commands, don’t forget to disable SSH.
SSH into the host. Navigate to the VMFS datastore you would like to perform the UNMAP on.
Once you attach to the host using SSH, issue

[code] cd /vmfs/volumes/<datastore_name>[/code]

Now that you’re locate inside the LUN, you are ready to perform the UNMAP. The actual command is simple.

[code]vmkfstools -y 99[/code]

Using the -y parameter, you specify the integer percentage of free space to reclaim. If the LUN has 300GB of free space reported in vSphere, the command will create a balloon file that is 99% of 300GB in size (297GB). Once the file is created, it is removed zeroing the space. You should adjust your percentage as you see fit. Starting somewhere in the 80’s would be a good place to start.

The safest recommendation is to run the storage reclamation outside of business hours or at least outside of peak business hours. Impacts may vary, but in my experience the 3PAR handles the requests easily .

July 31, 2013 2 comments

Datacenter Storage

HP’s Tom Joyce talks converged infrastructure and HP’s new Converged Systems Group

by Philip Sellers July 29, 2013

written by Philip Sellers

Like most things, IT concepts tend to be cyclical. Many years ago, Windows and Linux on x86 hardware changed the course of purpose-built solutions, moving customers to what became industry standard servers. Before them, customers bought proprietary hardware with proprietary storage and proprietary software. Now, the complexities of deploying industry standard servers are moving customers back to optimized, purpose-built solutions for particular problems to streamline deployment time and optimize performance.

IT professionals agree that anything done in a purpose-built converged system can also be accomplished with off-the-shelf components, but HP says customers want converged systems for two critical reasons – speed and agility. HP’s converged solutions are targeted to help customers deploying specific software packages get a very tailored hardware solution to run their software package on a very short timeline with high performance.

Last month, Tom Joyce, senior vice president and general manager of Converged Systems, stopped by the bloggers lounge at HP Discover to talk with us about future directions in converged systems. Convergence is a topic that HP has been talking about for the last 5 years, but HP is also realigning its business practices behind the converged system, announcing in April that it was forming the Converged Systems Group.

So, what makes a converged system? According to Joyce, Converged Solutions include four components:

Server
Storage

Networking
Integrated Management

HP is seeing a lot of opportunity in the mid-market around converged systems. A lot of mid-market customers still have silos where virtualization can really benefit them, but the typical mid-market customers do not have the benefit of a lot of staffing according to Joyce, so HP is working to integrate solutions to make the solution easier to use, manage and maintain. And while some converged systems are created around single products, some of HP’s portfolio has been created around customer choice – with HP VirtualSystem being a prime example. HP has created the VirtualSystem platform to accommodate multiple hypervisors, allowing the customer to choose what’s best for their business.

A lot of discussion in the lounge centered around what makes converged solutions different from off-the-shelf components – and the consensus from both bloggers and Joyce is that the integrated management component is critical to the converged solution. In HP’s case its Insight Control and Insight Management are the key tools in the portfolio today, but Joyce says the management solutions are definitely going towards ‘a much richer experience.’

HP’s Factory Express seems to be a competitive differentiator when it comes to converged solutions, as well. Joyce talked with the bloggers about First Data Corporation, a financial services company that writes software for banking. First Data utilized HP and specifically the Factory Express capabilities to create a package system that includes a customer load of software for First Data’s customers. Rather than the company having to become infrastructure experts and order, assemble and then ship and deliver infrastructure solutions to their customers, they work with HP to create a converged solution with their custom software to deliver to customers, relying on HP to assemble the solution.

Much of the focus with creating converged systems within HP is centered around an optimized configuration of hardware and software around a software solution – whether its Microsoft Exchange, a hypervisor, or a high-end solution like SAP HANA. These optimized solutions are created with the use-case in mind. They also come with some sort of enabling software from HP to streamline the deployment process and decrease the time of deployment for the customer.

When talking about the support organization at HP, Joyce admitted there is some work to be done there. From personal experiences with converged solutions, HP’s support group can be cumbersome to navigate – resulting in the customer being bounced from group to group before finding the proper resource to fix a solution. This is disheartening to a customer who has been presented a sales presentation of a unified solution only to find its supported piecemeal.

July 29, 2013 0 comments

Datacenter Storage

HP enhances 3PAR StoreServ Peer Persistence with automatic failover

by Philip Sellers July 3, 2013

written by Philip Sellers

VMware Metro Storage Clusters running on top of 3PAR StoreServ storage have gotten an added boost of automation. HP announced 3PAR OS 3.1.2 MU2 during HP Discover two weeks back and one of the features that it introduced is a quorum witness node to assist in Peer Persistence installations. Peer Persistence is the HP 3PAR StoreServ’s version of metro clustered storage for VMware, providing transparent failover of storage from one array to another. With the introduction of the quorum witness, the administrator no longer has to start the failover manually and the witness server adds monitoring and remediation in the event of an outage.

The quorum witness is a separate virtual or physical machine that monitors the availability of both arrays in each site. In most configurations, it should sit in a third site monitoring the two 3PAR arrays. If one of the sites goes down or offline, it detects the status and begins failover on the remaining 3PAR StoreServ array. Because the 3PAR StoreServ uses ALUA to block and open the active IO paths, the failover is seamless to the VMware workloads. All of this is accomplished by using the same virtual volume world wide name on both arrays and by blocking IO to the secondary copy.

Source: HP

During HP Discover, I was able to talk with several HP engineers about the new feature and one of my initial concerns was whether this is an all or nothing configuration for automated failover. Fellow blogger, Justin Vashisht, confirmed that each virtual volume or group of virtual volumes can be controlled automatically or manually – the administrator has the choice when configuring the volumes.

When we purchased our 3PAR StoreServ arrays earlier this year, our sales team confirmed that the automated failover would be forthcoming and so, as a customer, this is a feature we are happy to see delivered quickly. One of the unknowns to us was how HP would architect the quorum witness, but in talking with Siamak Nazari, an HP Fellow and chief software architect of HP Storage division, HP adapted the 3PAR Storage Processors to also do the duty of quorum witness. This means the new feature is based upon what should be solid and field-tested code.

Nazari and David Scott, HP Storage Senior Vice President and General Manager, stopped by the bloggers area at HP Discover for a coffeetalk with a large group of us. One of the things that I found most interesting from the talk is that HP has somewhat future-proofed the 3PAR StoreServ arrays it is already shipping – by baking in additional capabilities into the ASIC and by activating those with software at later time. That leaves hope that there will be other new capabilities introduced for existing customers, although nothing specific was revealed to us.

When I first discussed the Peer Persistence feature on my blog earlier this year, I praised the simplicity of the solution both from an architectural and administrative standpoint. While advancing the features in the new release, I think that HP has also made a wise choice to keep things simple even with the quorum witness added to the mix. As an administrator, I appreciate the straight forward and easy to understand (and troubleshoot) approach of the solution.

Another welcome feature for GUI fans, HP has introduced control of Peer Persistence under the Remote Copy tools within the 3PAR Management Console GUI. This means that administrators now have the choice of configuring and initiating failover from within the GUI, though I think I still prefer the single command-line command.

And as of the time of writing, HP reports that 3PAR Peer Persistence is VMware Metro Storage Clustering certified, although I do not see it in the VMware compatibility matrix yet. Lots of great incremental improvements to the 3PAR StoreServ line with this new OS revision.

Disclosure: HP sponsored my trip to HP Discover, covering all travel expenses, however HP does not control the content of the posts that I write based on my attendance to the show. The thoughts, impressions and information contained in this post are my own.

July 3, 2013 1 comment

Compute Datacenter Trends

HP’s Moonshot powering its corporate website, web farms

by Philip Sellers June 13, 2013

written by Philip Sellers

HP’s Proliant Moonshot servers are powering its website, serving up 300,000 visits per month on less than it takes to power 12, 60-watt light bulbs, says executives, including Meg Whitman, during their keynotes this week at HP Discover. The Proliant Moonshot platform was officially launched to the public in April and first ships with cartridges with low-power Intel Atom processors.

According to HP Fellow Dwight Barron, they saw the next wave of low energy processors and thought how do we leverage those processors for the next wave of server computing. With Moonshot the intent is really to go after highly specialized hardware optimized for specific applications. Cartridges for Moonshot go after solutions that do one thing very well.

Barron, who serves as the Chief Technologist for HP Servers Hyperscale, also said that the market is very new and there are many possibilities that can be explored with the systems. What Moonshot allows for the company is to take new silicon and turn it into an actual cartridge product within a few weeks. The Moonshot design allows the cartridges to interface with the global management inside of the Moonshot chassis. Each new cartridge design goes through HP’s normal checks and quality assurance before being released, but it really increases the flexibility of releasing an entirely new product and keeping current with industry changes for hyperscale systems.

Asked about use cases for Moonshot and uptake, John Gromala, Director of HP Hyperscale Server Product Marketing, says that orders for Moonshot within its first few weeks on the market are already exceeding HP’s expectations. The target markets of the product are really hosting and static web server farms. Within the hosting market, Moonshot with x86 processor cartridges would provide a path to dedicated servers at the price point similar to a virtual server instance.

At the present time, the cartridges inside of a chassis are all uniform and mean to be for scale out solutions. One example that was given was around the banking industry – with many banks moving to mobile check deposits, banks may also want to include facial recognition along with the check to be deposited, but the facial recognition could be greatly improved with special silicon made onto a front-end web server. The special silicon in an industry stand server could be accomplished with a PCI expansion card, but in Moonshot, you can buckle the GPU with a low-power CPU’s in order to achieve long-term cost savings across mass scale.

While not for mass enterprise adoption, Moonshot hits the mark for large hosting providers, where energy savings and increased density have an appeal for mass deployments. Moonshot, as it evolves, is a new innovation to watch.

June 13, 2013 0 comments

Datacenter

Whitman looks to assure customers and partners of HP’s future

by Philip Sellers June 12, 2013

written by Philip Sellers

HP CEO Meg Whitman used the first keynote of this week’s HP Discover to assure customers and partners that HP is returning to health and is here to stay for the long term.

The hour long keynote kicked off with special guest Kevin Bacon playing up his 6 degree’s notoriety and talking about the connectedness of people. He talked about how the simple college game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon turned into a phenomenon and how he parlayed that name into a charity called sixdegrees.org. The experiences with this charity and website opened his eyes to the possibilities of big data and how information could be harnessed for good. It was an interesting opening to what we knew would be more on the topic of big data.

Whitman took the stage and moved right into business by highlighting some of the success stories that she had to share from HP customers whose IT has been transformed including Nationwide and United Airlines. But to highlight the big data topic of the year, Whitman showed off a system that HP developed with NASCAR to collect and analyze fan’s reactions and topics of conversation. The project is known as NASCAR’s Fan and Media Engagement Center.

Joined on stage by NASCAR Chief Marketing Officer Steve Phelps, Whitman asked how the project has been changing NASCAR’s live broadcast. Phelps shared a story about how during a rain delay, that a new “Air Titan” dryer system used at Daytona was getting a lot of attention from fans online and that NASCAR and the on-air broadcasters were able to realize and adapt to this interest during the live broadcast. This sort of collection and analysis of real-time data is certainly a cool, if not slightly scary, application of big data tools. HP is also using the technology to spot trends and what people are talking about online from the Discover show this week.

But the remainder of the time was used by Whitman to assure everyone attending that HP has improved it bottom line and cash flow, both signs of financial health, its increased investment into research and development, returning to its historical position on the matter and that its going to be in business for the long haul. All three are welcome points to nervous customers who’ve endured the rocky transitions from Hurd to Apotheker to Whitman.

Meg Whitman at Discover 2013

June 12, 2013 0 comments