Not able to attend VMworld in San Francisco? No problem! Allow me to give you the scoop on what happened at the HP booth!

One of the interesting things that came across my desk today was an e-mail about SearchDataCenter.com's 2010 Products of the Year. In the Server Hardware category, the winner was the HP DL980 G7.

In their evaluation, SearchDataCenter.com said that the DL980 G7 capped out almost every specification that you can, especially since it's starting price is under $37,000. They also liked the quick incorporation of the 8 core Intel Xeon 7500 processors in this system. They mention that the new servers this year better integrate into a virtual environment as well as boost virtual machine environments with improved I/O designs.

The article also mentioned theHP DL580 G7, and think that it will show up in a whole lot of data centers due to its versatility, power, and overall performance.

If you add in a recent Scale Up x86 article which Chris blogged about a few weeks ago, it isn't surprising that the conclusion is that 3 - 4 year old RISC systems can now consider a scale up x86 server and get similar hardware performance, scaling, and resiliency as they would have gotten on their last purchase, but at a much lower price.

Of course, if you wonder where this leaves UNIX, and especially HP-UX, they absolutely still make sense for mission critical workloads that need better availability, better raw performance, and better scaling. With a Converged Infrastructure, HP allows both of these environments to easily co-exist, something most other vendors seem to discourage.

Jacob Van Ewyk

Well, it is
Thursday morning, and the last day of Tech @ Work. I'm catching one last
session before heading to the airport. While I often blog about HP-UX, this
time I'm trying to learn a little more about Windows, especially for mission
critical environments.

Laurence
Grizaud, the speaker, started out covering some of the trends in the industry:
things like pressure to reduce underutilized servers, reducing physical servers
using virtualization, and things like that.

Laurence  talked about the needs to be scalable,
reliable, and operationally efficient. While scale out is one way to increasing
resources, she focused on scale up solutions. Windows runs on  everything from a 2 socket server to a
Superdome with 64 sockets and 128 cores and 256 threads. Windows 2008 R2 now
supports up to 128 cores, up to 2 Tb of memory, and up to 192 I/O slots that
are available on the Superdome. This provides a stable platform for large OLTP,
Business Intelligence, and Data warehouse workloads, for server consolidation
using VMware, Hyper-V, or database instance stacking, or for I/O or memory
constrained applications that require the added scalability.

At the end of
the day, the scaling requirements of your application will usually determine
whether you use a scale up or scale out model. For instance, SQL 2008 R2 will
be able to balance its workload across all 256 logical processors (threads) on
a current Superdome. HP offers servers that can work in either scenario.

If you are going
to add a whole bunch of workloads to a single server, the impact of an outage
is much more serious since it impacts more workloads. That usually requires a
more reliable and resilient infrastructure. A more reliable system means less
problems. A more resilient server means that if there is a problem, the server
doesn't fail and bring down the workloads. This extends to extended distance
clusters to provide availability even if a server, or datacenter, goes down.

Finally, there
is a requirement for operational efficiency. Most customers have Window servers
running somewhere in their environment. If you are looking for a scale up,
mission critical Windows server, it should use the same tools and processes as
you already use on smaller systems. HP includes the HP Insight Foundation, and
offers the HP Insight Control and HP Insight Dynamics across all of our servers
that offer Windows support.

HP mission
critical Windows servers - offering scalability, resiliency, and operational
efficiency. Do you use scale up Windows servers? If so, what applications do
you run, and what hardware do you utilize.

Well, this is
just about it for me at Tech @ Work this year. It has been a great time with
the new product introductions, meeting customers and colleagues, and listening
to some great speakers. I'm on the road for a few weeks in the APJ region, so
blog updates might be a little more sparse. Hopefully you have found the team
coverage of Tech @ Work interesting.

Jacob

I finally got out to see the movie Avatar in 3D last week with a bunch of friends. I enjoyed the movie, and the animation and 3D effects were wonderful.

What is more interesting is the infrastructure behind the movie. A lot of the work was done on HP BL2x220c blades in HP Bladesystem c7000 enclosures. Imagine racks of them - or about 40,000 processors and 104 Tb of memory, according to the Reality Check - Server Insights blog posting at http://www.communities.hp.com/online/blogs/reality-check-server-insights/archive/2010/01/13/the-it-behind-the-big-blockbuster-sci-fi-hit-avatar.aspx.

This is a great example of scaling out to do a huge job. But, the nice thing is that the same infrastructure can also be used for HP Integrity BL860c and BL870c blades . Even the HP Non-Stop servers are available in a bladed architecture, and they have some of the highest levels of uptime in the industry.

Compared to rack-mount servers, our customers save floor space, power and cooling, and even management time and expenses compared to the save compute power in a rack-mount chassis. So, whether you are scaling out to render a new movie, running a mission critical database instance, or helping run a commodities exchange, a HP BladeSystem infrastructure can help run your business today.

Jacob

Based on all the news around Oracle and Sun, I know that there are a lot of Sun customers considering their options, especially if they are looking to replace older systems as the economy stabilizes and they are looking towards some growth next year. HP, and most of our competitors, offer a whole host of offerings for Sun customers who are looking to move. One of those options, especially since most people are already running Windows in their environment, is moving some of their mission critical applications to Windows, either in a scale up or a scale out environment.

I got an e-mail from a co-worker, Dan, that I though I'd pass along. It may be of interest for people who are considering application redeployment on Windows.

"



Hi Jacob,

I know you are aware of the robust program HP has for users of Sun equipment to help them migrate to HP in light of the uncertainties surrounding Sun.   This is the Sun Complete Care program .

But I want you to also know about a special part of this program.  We have teamed up with Microsoft and Intel to help those Sun users who may be thinking about moving to a windows environment.  Windows on HP servers is a wonderfully cost-effective, reliable, and scalable alternative to Sun.  It is also backed by three of the most stable and innovative companies in our industry.  To introduce Sun users to the program we are recording a series of webinars that cover the topic of Sun migration to HP,  Microsoft, and Intel, in general as well as one each focusing on SAP and business intelligence (BI).  They are very informative and cover many of the whys, hows, and cost implications of such a move.

The webinars can be found at  http://www.bitpipe.com/detail/RES/1256737022_263.html

In addition you can check out the joint HP/Microsoft/Intel web site established for this program at http://www.SecureFutureNow.com.

Best regards,

Dan"