HP Discover: Day One Recap

At the HP Discover conference in Las Vegas, Day 1 of the gathering focused on business analytics, power management and storage management for data centers. Here’s an update.

During Day 1 of HP Discover, Hewlett-Packard discussed:

POD Power

HP made it clear that energy efficiency is a company priority. HP claims that the POD 240a has a near perfect power usage rating (PUE) of 1.07. The PUE rating was created by the Green Grid and is used to determine how efficiently a data center uses its power. It’s found by dividing the amount of power going into a data center by the power used to run the entire infrastructure.

HP Senior Vice President and General Manager of Infrastructure Software and Blades Mark Potter offered these insights on the so-called eco-POD: “It mixes air from the outside with its own air to keep cool. It’s up to 95 percent more efficient than a traditional data center, and it’s available for deployment anywhere in the world.” The HP POD 240a PUE remains the same no matter where it’s located because it constantly monitors the temperature and humidity of its environment and adapts accordingly.

Goodbye StorageWorks, Hello HP Storage

Meanwhile, HP re-branded StorageWorks as HP Storage, noted David Scott, general manager and senior VP of HP Storage.

Among the product enhancements: HP’s X9000 IBRIX now has mass archiving capabilities with an ISV solution certification, increased hardware efficiency courtesy of Proliant G7 servers, and a new metadata search capability that HP claims, “enables new business insight.”

HP is also unleashing a new Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) device that  says will answer a question frequently asked of HP. “One question we get a lot from the press is, ‘are you going to come out with a modern EVA?’,” said Dave Donatelli, executive VP of Enterprise Servers and Storage. “Well, here it is.”

The new HP P6000 EVA is part of HP’s fifth-generation EVA line of storage devices. The main function of the HP P6000 EVA is to help users consolidate application data and reduce costs. It features Dynamic LUN Migrationwith 8Gb Fibre Channel, fibre channel over ethernet (FCoE) support and 10 Gb iSCSI.

Completing the trio of storage solutions and enhancements in the new HP Storage portfolio is the HP X5000 G2 Network Storage System. It’s based on HP’s BladeSystem technology and supports Windows storage capabilities. “The direction of the market is convergence. Technology is coming together again,” Donatelli continued. “HP, I think, correctly predicted this about 18 months ago.”

HP’s new storage solutions are based around what the company says are four key industry trends: converged storage, converged systems, alternative data centers, and public/private/hybrid clouds.

Goodbye StorageWorks, Hello HP Storage

HP earlier this year acquired Vertica – the real-time analytics platform company. During HP Discover yesterday, Vertica Vice President of Product Management Colin Mahoney joined HP executives at the event’s commencement press conference to introduce the new and appropriately named HP Vertica Analytics System.

“We talk about ROI, but instead of investment, it’s a return on information,” Mahoney told a room full of reporters. There are four main features of the HP Vertica Analytics System:

1. Faster time to value: It’s built on HP Converged Infrastructure and based on an appliance delivery model for fast deployment of applications. HP also says very little configuration is needed.

2. Real-time analytics: The HP Vertica Analytics System captures the time value of the data, is up to 1000x faster than older models or similar devices developed by other companies when it comes to query performance, and compresses data so that users can store up to one Petabyte in a single track.

3. Agile environment: According to HP, the system can seamlessly integrate with any ecosystem of analytics solutions and features automatic redundancy, failover and recovery. Additionally, its Massively Parallel Procession (MPP) architecture allows for a linear scale out when it comes to cheaper, industry standard servers.

4. Global service & support provides a single point of accountability: HP is offering training and on-site installation to clients looking to purchasing the HP Vertica Analytics System. The company is also giving users a one year, 24×7 software/hardware support service.

CEO Teaser Alert

Stay tuned. It’s a safe bet HP CEO Leo Apotheker will discuss a so-called HP CloudAgile strategy sometime at the HP Discover conference this week. We started hearing rumors about the HP cloud strategy during Google I/O a few weeks ago, and again during the Ingram Micro Cloud Summit last week. I’ll be back with updates and analysis — either here or on TalkinCloud.com — as the news happens.

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