Posts by Loyal1 18 publicly visible posts • joined 11 May 2010
I have worked for them both in their storage businesses. They are both pale shadows of their former selves. HPE is just further down the slippery slope than Dell at this time.
Bill and Dave must be spinning out there watching the succession of thieves and idiots screwing their business over.
Indeed, Cloud is Just updated computer Bureau Services model from the 60s and 70s.
...and of course, virtualisation at compute, storage and network levels, also all hails from the mainframe. But “Cloud is good, Mainframe is bad” repeat mantra at C level until someone signs up.
<<Nowadays there seems to be a culture that if you kid misses a single day of school or a single hour of homework it will negatively impact the entire rest of their lives. >>
....yet oddly the teachers at my kids schools routinely 'take' 5-6 extra teaching term time days for 'in service', whatever that means.
FFS The Oldies? 40+ ~It's not like we are all just doing the 'three score and 10' innings these days.
<<Over the past five years, Big Blue has axed over 20,000 American employees who were 40 years old or more, it is estimated, amounting to roughly 60 per cent of its US job cuts...>>>
...with (old) folk regularly living well into their late 80s, what will they do for the other half of their lives?
Hopefully they will steer any investment pots away from companies that use such ageist practices.
sigh.
Sounds like HP from 2005-2009. Because of accruals accounting principle, getting staff to take holiday makes a difference to opex. there is a alkso a direct reduction in expenses whilst they are all off.
It is a sign of desparation though. I expect the marketing and travel budgets have already been pruned.
That's the trouble with relying on Public Sector contracts. Especially in current US and UK climate
SW that uses proprietary data format to write (Symantec springs to mind) is biggest concern for migrating data. An open format such as tar makes sense as it can be read anywhere.
As for reading a 15 year old tape, this still happens in the MF market and with some savvy operators in the OS sector. Of course with an open format it is quite easy to migrate through tape generations. People on LTO 1,2,3 have migrated to LTO 4, 5 with little operational impact, so that's 12 year straight away. Cost wise a few tape drive upgrades in a library, or even a new library are still far cheaper than cost of powering and managing that same data on an expensive HDS, EMC array for that period of time.
BMW Gmbh last year finally decomissioned a tape silo and migrated data to newer formats, after 18 years non stop operation.
Show me a 99.9999% array that is still in production at the data centre after 5 years. Show me a Data Domain appliance that has been running anything approaching these sorts of duty cycles.
This is sort of reliability that tape offers and cannot be matched by HDD:
http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2010/12/nersc-proving-tape-as-cost-effective-and-reliable-primary-data-storage/
Until there is a quantum change in storage technology tape has a role, and that is growing in current market.
Thing about Datadomain and dedupe in general being the 'new tape' is that DD have not been going long enough to see what it means having to restore large data sets data from 5 years ago, after first rehydrating it, which I think will be no quicker in operation than big restores for a tape system.
Of course your average EMC salesman will be there to support his customer 5 years hence, if they are having a challenge waiting for the array to piece together the critical data.
And of course tape is very cheap to power compared to keeping all your deduped data continually spinning on HDD, in case it is needed. The operational life of HDD arrays is significantly less than for tape, and the product life cycle reflects this too.
And of course EMC will doubtless change direction again in 2 years, just as they did with Quantum. You DataDomian fans just keep paying for the licensing and the power.
I don't think Cesare is much of a Guru. His thinking is very last year. Disc is on downward slope, flash and tape on ascendency. IDC think same for their 2011 storage predictions.
Why did HP buy Compaq? (pc/server market share and the hubris of Fiorina)
Why did HP but StorageApps for $650m only to find that they had bought a re-boxed Dell server with some dodgy virtualiation interface and single digit installed customer base, none of whom were satisfied? (To stop EMC acquiring them and to line a few 'inside' pockets)
This is just corporate business, and yes it does deflect from Hurd's lascivious nature and greedy fiddling expenses.
The real joke is in HP adding yet another storage architecture; yet another choice for customers to become confused over; yet another small company to be poorly integrated (Hello Mercury, Hello Synstar, Hello Polyserve...etc) in the corporate giant in its quest to be more profitable than IBM.
Donnatelie really has no idea what he is dealing with in GarageLand. They'd be better placed spending some money tp motivate the HP staff, who used to be their best asset but many of whom are just free-wheeling nowadays.
Assuming one can stage the data to be streamed, this drive is staggeringly fast at backing up large volumes. Removing a tape for offsite archiving has saved many organisations over the years who have had to rebuild systems following catastrophic primary site failiure. Tape was never positioned as the 24/7 availability solution, but sometimes recovery points in minutes (or hours) are 'good enough' and cost effective.
Sure you can spend 100s of 1000s of dollars on multiple site, multiple vendor, replication strategiesat HW, SW and DATA levels, and VMware are doing very well at peddling ever complex virtual back up and recovery stories with EMC. When the building is down and data centre burned buried (think Bunsfield). That little tape monkey referred to on this thread, can still, get those tapes out of afiresafe somewhere, drive them in his van, do a bare metal rebuild, especially if he uses boot from tape, and get a system going from scratch in a reasonable amount of time, when all else may appear lost - and the SAN/NAS fusion gurus are looking for one neck to choke in their multi vendor overly solutions that looked so good on the white board...
LTO Tapes have a tested minimun 30 year data life and onboard physical encryption that meets mots security reqs and regs, as opposed to fudging it with proprietory HDD access software for teh non tape vendors. I am not aware of any HDD manufacturer, especially SATA drives that offer any data life guarentee at all.
I cant coment for the STK formats but LTO has good backwards compatibility.
HP and IBM sell several billion $ tape each year, and this has declined/levelled in some sectors, mainly SME (never was in consumer) who have yet to experience a total meltdown. That Oracle are re netering the fray means tape is not dead.
Tape has done and seems set to remain a great fallback for the more experienced data centre managers who have seem every conceivable failiure. You won't find too many about to rely soley on spinny cheap sata HDDs for Backup/DR.
Oracle will have and end to end solution from the application to the 1s and 0s on some sort of media, and that is a good story.
Reality may of course difffer from the white board topography scetch and that financial scenario that the salesman so skillfully sold to the CFO....
No one will get fired for using simple tape backup.
..middle managers barracade talent out with Process and strict chain of command upward communications, then get down to the serious business of managing by constantly pushing back under the guise of 'reasonableness'. This stifles both the top dogs and skilled individual contributor groups from communicating effectively and exchanging views and ideas. In turn this slows decisions and renders Strategy redundant, since the PARASITES are by now using all of the organisations Powerpoint/EXcel resources to keep the other groups apart.
Middle managers eh?
"Back to basics and do what they do best." Return to core company values and the HP Way. Ecept of course it's all long gone and irretrievable.
Implementing that strategy will keep the next CEO occupied and affluent for five years, as long as he/she can keep his hands to himself. Then ?HP can hire another operationally inept Visionary. Then 5 years with a Cost Cutter. And so on ad infinitum.
Unless they hire an HP long termer from within.....and then stick a family member back on the executive board for good measure. Trouble is Fiorina threw Walter out with the baby and the bathwater.
I fear for the med/long tern value of my HP shares.
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