I've been to HP Discover 2011 in Las Vegas. The event started on June 6th and ended June 10th. Before I left I was very curious if there were any new developments regarding storage and converged infrastructure. Well, this was the case!
To my surprise there was al lot more going than I could ever imagine. I heard great news about HP Storage, HP Networking, HP Converged Infrastructure, HP Servers and HP Virtual Disk devices. There was also a Confidential Area and it was full of new products or enhancements on existing products. Naturally I can't tell anything about this because you have to be under NDA to get this information. But there are some new developments I can talk about.
HP Storage
The specs of the new HP P6000 are really great. Besides the possibility to use SAS and SATA diskes, Thin Provisioning is also possible (combination of Thin Provisioning in combination with Business Copy and Continuous Access is supported in September).
Watch te HP P4000 the next comming year, there will be some great enhancements!!
We also saw the new HP 3PAR systems in the CDA, I think specs will be released soon by HP.
HP Networking
We saw the biggest switch availale on the planet, the new 40Gb modules and the announcement was made that there will be a new switch comming wich doubles the features and speed.
HP Converged Infrastructures
The HP stategy in Cloud computing is based on the CloudSystem. There are three kind of CloudSystems:
HP CloudSystem Matrix:
- Private cloud solution
- Provides infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
- Provision infrastructure and applications in minutes
- Private or hybrid cloud
- Supports full range of service models
- Single services view
- Advanced application-to-infrastructure lifecycle management
- Public or hosted private cloud designed for service providers
- Provides software as a service (SaaS)
- Supports aggregation and management for services
In the Confidential Area were the new G8 ProLiants available. So this means that in short term, the current servers (Rack and Blade) will get some nice upgrades.
HP Virtual Disk devices
In the future it will be possible to use StoreOnce on more than only D2D backup systems. StoreOnce will be used in the X-series as well. Imagine what kind of nice solutions you can build to mix HP hardware and StoreOnce software.
Besides the business entertainment, there was also time for fun. With my two colleagues Tom Wallaard and Martijn Doedens and our HP friend Kees Verbaan we had a great time. We did a helicopter tour to the Grand Canyon, landed there, had some champagne and flew back over the strip by sunset. This was really awesome and I'll never forget this adventure.
There will be more on the blog regarding HP Discover soon.
Greetz Remco
