Posts by friet

White box servers? We can do that, says HP Enterprise chief

Cloudline servers ..

Well first and for all, Cloudline requires a yearly uptake of 10K units (that number could have changed, but don't bet on it). So not for the small providers.

Second if you are wondering if anyone is using them, I suggest you visit one of Microsoft's European data centers.... :-) (Yes, I work for Hewlett Packard Enterprise..so I am biased).

Now, HPE already has a series of lower cost servers (DL60/80 series, DL160/180) and some boxes designed for specific workloads (the Apollo series), that don't require you to buy the servers by the truckload..

The strange thing is, although HPE has all those 'cheaper' boxes available, customers, even service providers, all ask and buy the more expensive DL3xx series.. think twice about that..

'Turn to nuclear power to save planetary ecology from renewable BLIGHT'

Nuclear expensive? Are you joking?

I live in Belgium.. we only have 7 Nuclear reactors; of whom 3 are now temporary out of operation. The electricity company claims that every reactor not running costs them a whopping 40million € of profit per month (not revenue !, profit)..or in this case around 1.5 billion Euro of profit a year.. (about 1.3Billion pounds or 2 billion$ !). don't come and tell us that nuclear is expensive...

Chinese upstart smears Android's Ice Cream Sandwich over PCs

Android on x86??

They obviously never heard of the android X86 ports : http://www.android-x86.org/

Regards,

Frank

HP posts $8.9bn loss on slow sales, charges in Q3

Re: Duffer

Well,.. Then you forget about Compaq ProLiant (now HP ProLiant..).. when i looked at what DEC was producing at the time Compaq bought them..no wonder DEC couldn't sell x86 stuff... Let's look at what Compaq added to the value of x86 servers : The first ever x86 server with (their own!) RAID controllers, Hot Pluggable hard disks, redundant power supplies, the first x86 servers with hot pluggable memory (yes, RAM in RAID 1), iLO, to name a few. And what did DEC offer...none of this..except flaky third party RAID controllers..(Mylex, etc... where are these now?). and don't get me wrong : i still believe the Alpha CPU technology was the best ever..a pity its no longer there..

Yes they used (and still use) x86 CPU's and that's where it all ends..if it were not for Compaq, the x86 server market wouldn't even exist !

And yes, i used to work for Compaq (and now HP)

HDS first past VAAI post

HP first....

Hi Guys,

Let me jump in as well...HP announced and started shipped VAAI integration on the P4000 platform in November 2010...

Cheers,

Frank

SAN vs NAS: Spelling out the differences

He's obviously not a storage guy....missing the point completely...

The continuous debate of NAS vs SAN based Arrays. First of all notice the difference..SAN is indeed only a network..and i couldn't care less if it is Fibre Channel, FCOe (or better CEE), iSCSI, or whatever protocol comes along in the future to talk accross that network.

The discussion should be : file server (=NAS) vs external disk array (= what you connect to a SAN).. And again the thing is : a file server is primarily used to connect PCs or Macs.. to provide file shares and nothing else.

An external array is designed to connect to servers, not PCs (and a role of one of those servers could be..file serving).. It is mostly used for applications like Exchange, SQL, Oracle to name a few. Those are not built to use file shares to host their databases. They expect a 'dedicated' disk (in case of an external array,a volume presented to them).

And as someone else also mentioned yes, there are NAS devices out there that can also act as an external disk array (eg. using openfiler or FreeNAS). What they fail to mention is that using a standard file server will introduce single points of failure... now, i don't want to bet my business on a device without redundant controller capabilities...

And yes, there are also NAS solutions out there that do tackle the 'SPOF' issue..but then you already see where we're going...its actually two NAS boxes connected to...an external disk array..voila..full circle..

There should be no debate NAS /SAN ...both have their use.

Regards,

Frank

Location, location: Storage controller functions get moving

What's New?

What is new here ? The HP P4000 (formerly Lefthand) VSA appliance software does exactly what is described in this article : place the controller stack onto a VM... both running under VMWare ESX or MS Hyper-V.. And can use Internal disks, JBODs, as well as external arrays as its physical storage source..

Cheers,

Frank