Here is my wrap-up of the HP Discover 2014 event in Las Vegas.
I was invited again this year by HP ExpertOne to be a trainer for the new Building Server Solutions class, to prepare my students (from almost everywhere in the world) to pass the HP0-S40 exam… Got great feedback, and a lot of positive exam results… Great job!
Since I was in Vegas my good friend @HPStorageGuy aka Calvin Zito (blog) invited me to join the HP independent blogger team… With all his connections in the HP storage world he arranged some great face2face meetings with 3PAR guru’s like Ivan Iannaccone and Priyadarshi Prasad. If you need to know anything (and I really mean anything) from 3PAR, if they don’t know it, no one knows…
Thanks Calvin for making this possible.
So what happened at Vegas on the HP side? Well quite a lot actually… Find here an overview.
In upcoming blog posts I will dive deeper in each topic.
3PAR all-flash 7450 update with deduplication
On the 3PAR side the most important announcement was the big software upgrade which enables in-line hardware-accelerated deduplication by the ASIC. This gives a much more efficient space usage, and so less storage needed in the system for the same amount of data.
Together with the launch of the new 1,92TB SSD’s and the updated Thin cloning software, HP promises that they can obtain a price of 2$ per GB, which is today the street price of a SAS drive. This is impressive! If this story goes on the next years, would this mean that we do not need SAS drives anymore? Just SSD’s and MDL SAS drives. To be followed up for sure…
Oneview 1.10 with integrated 3PAR management
Oneview is the next update after the current version 1.05. Oneview 1.10 adds SAN storage provisioning and management within the same console. Users will be able to easily import 3PAR StoreServ storage arrays, define and provision storage volumes, and automatically zone the SAN as part of the provisioning process. A good example of what is Converged Management.
Apollo 6000 and 8000 launch
Finally HP announced also in the x86 server market a complete new server family, besides the existing ML, DL, BL, SL and Moonshot servers.
The Apollo 6000 and 8000 series of servers are ideal in HPC aka High-Performance Computing environments. So it won’t be your typical Vmware or mail server…
Unique in the 8000 series is the fact that the rack will be 1OO percent liquid-cooled. HP patented some new technologies to solve the typical challenges with water cooling. The 6000 family will be traditionally air-cooled.
The 6000 series supports up to 160 servers per rack (compared to 64 in a BL series of servers). This setup gives more performance and efficiency in less space while using 46 percent less energy.
The 8000 series supports 144 servers per rack, nice to know there is that the US National Renewable Energy Labs (NREL) has this supercomputer installed and is using the waste heat from their supercomputer to heat adjacent office and lab space. A great example of the next generation green data center.
For this launch, HP invited Dr. Story Musgrave. He is a retired NASA astronaut and is the only one that has flown all five Space Shuttles, besides many other experiences. It was an honor to meet him at HP Discover.
This is just a short overview, like I mentioned above I will post soon other blog posts where I will dive deeper in each subject.
Of course there were plenty of other announcements on Helion, SDN Networking, flexible Thin Clients, Converged Systems, and many more. Unfortunately the event takes only 2,5 days so I have to point for more information on these subjects to the HP Discover website.
Or check the websites from my fellow bloggers who were invited in Vegas:
Justin Vashisht http://3cvguy.com/ @3cVguy
Robin Harris http://storagemojo.com/ @storagemojo
Jake Ludington http://jakeludington.com/ @jakeludington
Howard Marks http://deepstorage.net/ @DeepStorageNet
Andrew McCaskey, Jr. http://sdrnews.com/ @axmc
John Obeto http://absolutelywindows.com/ @johnobeto
Aaron Paxson http://www.myteneo.net/home @neelixx
Ernesto Pellegrino http://1cloudroad.com/ @1cloudroad
Nigel Poulton http://blog.nigelpoulton.com/ @nigelpoulton
Hector Russo http://geeksroom.com/ @geeksroom
Philip Sellers http://techazine.com/ @pbsellers
Enrico Signoretti http://juku.it/en/ @esignoretti
Bob Stein http://www.activewin.com/ @ActiveWin
Courtney Wallin http://sdrnews.com/ @CourtyPants
Julian Wood http://www.wooditwork.com/ @julian_wood
The HP Social Media Center, based on HP Big Data software from Autonomy, showed clearly the top influencers in social media during the event. Good to see that I was almost all the time in the Top 10. 😉
On these kinds of events you get a lot of side information… On the previous HP Discover we learned that HP.com website was running on the newly announced Moonshot servers, this time they gave us some more interesting numbers…
– HP has 63 PB of data deployed on 3PAR, XP and EVA
– 4 ecoPODs deployed in the US running mission critical applications
– 450.000 mailboxes managed
– +300 GBs infrastructure capacity
– 300 million hits per day on HP.com
– +41.000 servers
– +1500 enterprise HPN routers
– +15.000 HPN switches
– +150.000 mobile devices
– 4 PB of data replicated per day
– 442.000 PC’s deployed
Not important but nice to know!
Next HP Discover will be in Barcelona. Mark 2-4 December in your agenda. It is already in mine! Dos cervezas por favor! (The only Spanish I know, but the most important one…)
