HP's ProLiant Gen8 control freakery

Look out system administrators: Hewlett-Packard wants to give you more time to play video games or polish up your resumes – or both – with the forthcoming launch of its ProLiant Gen8 servers. . As part of its annual shindig with partners and resellers, which was hosted in Las Vegas a week ago, the biggest server shipper in the …

[Daf L]

Are these planted stories?

Lots of news about the HP gen8s and HP servers in general.

I have nothing against HP servers in fact we use a range of G5 to G7s, but the amount of articles recently suggest that there might be a bit of an advertorial going on?

Wouldn't like to think that El Reg is losing it's impartiality, so wondered if you could confirm....

[Florence]

Re: Are these planted stories?

HP have given a preview of these systems while other manufacturers are yet to show their Sandy Bridge servers, but I can only agree with you, the past couple of stories about G8 sys management totally read like advertorials.

I know El Reg does not only rehash HP's press releases, I'm sure we'll see similar once IBM and Dell announce their new servers - but isn't this the 3rd or 4th "article" on the topic? I could take one, but this is rather OTT.

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, but I'd be happy with them just fixing the bugs in existing HP insight - like the one thats apparently existed for years where if the monitoring agent for SCSI is enabled and an external SCSI tape drive attached then backups generally fail with timeout accessing the tape drive. Easily fixable with a reg fix, but really should we have to after its apparently been a problem for years?

[Chunky Lafunga]

Tosh

"So if a disk drive is getting wobbly, the system notifies HP, which ships a new drive."

Well we have Insight Remote running and HP will NEVER just ship a drive if a fault is detected which is what they claim.

All you may get is a phone call asking if the fault is real, if you have tried re-seating the drive, is the firmware up to date etc etc. Yawn.

Usual old lies spouted at launches with bloated Execs claiming rubbish which only exists in their heads. On the ground it's a different matter.

[James 100]

Re: Tosh

Maybe you need to upgrade to a higher tier of support for that ... I'm sure if you pay them truly stupid amounts of money they'll ship all the spares you want. Of course, it'll cost five times as much as buying the spares outright in the first place...

We had a bunch of Maxtor drives die in desktop PCs a few years back. Still under warranty, but it turned out that with the cost and hassle of shipping the dead drives to them (in Ireland!) then waiting and paying for shipping back, we were better just walking round the corner to buy fresh non-Maxtor drives from our local shop as needed. (The fact the warranty replacements were still Maxtors and still prone to premature death was also a factor, I seem to recall.)

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing is energy aware - that...

Nothing is energy aware that needs somebody else to plug it in.

[tpm]

Re: Nothing is energy aware - that...

That's Insight T2000 series.....

[foxyshadis]

Boot up times

Five second boot up? Nice - but unlikely; boot times have been getting longer with each Proliant generation, to the point that G7 takes almost 2 minutes just to light up the screen and another 2 to finish its internal diagnostics and disk array initialization, then you finally get any add-on card BIOS startup times as well. I'd be glad just to see that cut to 15-30 again.

The new Atom server coupled with iLO sounds awesome - our power budget is already strained and adding new VM hosts is becoming a major chore. Networking is still more pressing than power for us, though; Procurve prices are still astronomical compared to competitors' better-managed equivalents.

[Ammaross Danan]

Re: Boot up times

You missed that it was iLO that booted in under 5 seconds (under 3 seconds is what the story says). You can easily cut all the boot and initialization stuff out by loading a VM hypervisor on it :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Platinum Plus-rated?

"The ProLiant Gen8 machines will come with Platinum Plus-rated power supplies..."

Excellent! I have enjoyed a gander at the back side of a nice rack.

Perhaps I should mention that Platinum Plus is also the name of a strip club.