A range of big data solutions is being announced today at HP Discover. At the core of these was HAVEn, a set of services and products supporting the use of Hadoop, Autonomy, Vertica, Enterprise security, n of solutions (I guess that stands for the power of solutions).

The approach should address the common needs of organization today:

Supporting a range of consumption models:

- Operate yourself

• HP Vertica Community Editiondelivering full power of the HP Vertica Analytics Platform – available at no cost up to 1 TB of data – with enhanced self-service support capabilities and an enhanced portal for better interaction.
• The new Autonomy Legacy Data Cleanup solution is designed to address the cost, compliance, and control challenges confronted by organizations struggling to manage increasing volumes of legacy information.  Powered by Autonomy ControlPoint 4.0, this solution helps organizations gain access to, understand and classify, and defensibly dispose of outdated and unnecessary legacy information.
• HP Operations Analytics providing transparency and insight into the complete IT environment via a platform to collect and manage operational big data from a variety of HP and 3rd party sources. It combines powerful search, guided troubleshooting and visual analytics to provide actionable intelligence to resolve ANY issue and a management cockpit

- Consume as a service

• HP Actionable Analytics Services helping organizations unlock the information that’s hidden in their business data through direct delivery of analytics projects and consulting that develops and enhances in-house analytical capabilities. This services deliver optimization services for: Online Offers, Field Force, Procurement, and Inventory.

- Professional Services

• HP Big Data Architecture Strategy Services helps customers develop an integrated IT strategy for the capture, consolidation and management of Big Data, includes:  HP’s Big Data Infrastructure Transformation Experience Workshop.
• HP Big Data System Infrastructure Services New HP services that help organizations navigate the complexities of Hadoop design and implementation by providing customers with a detailed plan that considers deployment goals and supports growth, including. Services include: HP Enterprise Design for Hadoop, HP Reference Architecture Implementation for Hadoop and HP Implementation Service for Hadoop.
• HP Big Data Protection Services helping organizations identify potential issues and achieve compliance with government and industry data security requirements. Services include: HP Big Data Protection and Compliance Analysis.

In addition to HAVEn, there is also project Neutron, a big data analytics solution for IT operations teams to analyze the volume and variety of IT data to predict, prevent and respond to application and infrastructure issues, preventing costly downtime, but I didn’t have much info on that. If you poke around the HP Discover Site later today you’ll find it.

I don’t do posts about HP product announcements, but since this the week of HP Discover, why not. There definitly are some changes in the wind for storage.

One of the first things out of the shoot today at HP Discover was a whole new set of capability in the area of software defined storage. With all the options in storage today (SSD, low end, backup…) the complexity of managing the environment is reducing the flexibility of organizations. Storage solutions are becoming complex, inefficient and rigid.

The family of converged storage solutions announced today should help address many of these issues by providing a single architecture enabling a flexible and extensible approach that embraces block, object and file storage of devices ranging from HDDs to SSD/flash, providing:

• Performance acceleration – eliminating system bottlenecks
• Efficiency optimization – extending the life and utilization of existing media
• System resiliency – providing constant information/application access
• Data mobility – federating across systems and sites

With a range of HP 3PAR StoreServ solutions ranging from the low end 7200 to high performance (StoreServ 7450) or high scaling 10800 – all running from a single architecture and interface.

The 7450 that was announced today is:

• Accelerated:  Over 500,000 IOPS and less than 0.6 ms latency proving a massively parallelized architecture, flash-optimized cache algorithms and QoS
• Efficient:  Reduce capacity requirements up to 50% and extend flash lifespan delivering a multi-layered and fine-grained virtualization with hardware-accelerated data compaction
• Bulletproof:  Eliminate downtime for performance-critical applications with a Quad-controller design with persistent cache and ports, peer failover, and multi-site replication
• Futureproof:  Allowing organizations to move data seamlessly to balance performance and cost enabling a simple solution across Tier 1, midrange, and flash with federated data mobility

Also announced was HP StoreOnce VSA, a software defined approach to information protection enabling a more agile and efficient approach to remote information protection.

The breadth of these announcements should enable greater flexibility for organizations that maintain their own infrastructure.

Today (right before HP Discover) the availability of the retail sleeve for the ElitePad was announced. By adding this hardware extension, a tablet that runs the full version of Windows 8 now can have additional features specifically designed for use in a retail setting, allowing them to connect to existing store systems and improve customer service.

The extensible nature of the ElitePad is an example the flexibility that needs to be designed into solutions to increase value and the business environment today and in the future. Last month the personal system group within HP announced a whole series of new machines (like the Rove).

The new HP Pro and HP Elite series desktop PCs were also announced, including space-saving commercial all-in-ones (AiOs) with rich multimedia and optional touch screens, act as the hub of enterprise productivity. You can see more about these in the press release.

This week there should be a number of interest announcements… if you're there have fun it should be a great opportunity to answer questions and learn. I couldn't make it this year.

Lately, I’ve been a number of conversations with people about the strategic use of technologies. I mentioned the criteria I use to evaluate trends and technologies. We then typically get into a discussion about the difference in impact between some of the technologies that are much discussed today and how the tactical use differs from the strategic use.

For example:

• Analytics – Although you may need to gather more data and keep it longer, there is not enough attention space to sustain the effort unless you simplify, automate and focus attention only on what needs human involvement. Time to action/decisions has to be the measure of impact.
• Cloud – Although it may reduce costs in certain circumstances, the strategic impact of cloud techniques (whether it is infrastructure, processes or people) is to increase flexibility. If through the use of cloud techniques you end up increasing the flexibility, it cannot be sustained.
• Mobility – The mobility strategy for a business has to focus on improving the access to corporate information and reducing the latency in the decision-making process. If the focus remains on the devices, it will also fail.

These current technology directions (and others) have a strategic side and a tactical manifestation – make sure you know what is important to your business over the long haul when creating your plan of attack. If you want to reach the top you still go up one step at a time, but it is easy to lose sight of the goal along the way. Identify the metrics to measure progress and then measure the impact along the way and make adjustments.

When I was writing this post I felt it was a bit risky, since these technologies are viewed as so important today. The real point of the post is to view them strategically and not just a buzzword or fad. This tactical approach may be the reason that for some organizations, innovation is not working out.

After I got my Slate7 last week (which I have been very happy with by the way), I now see a whole new set of tablet-based platforms being discussed in the press. The Split x2 (for Windows 8) and the SlateBook x2 a serious tablet/laptop for Android.

It is clear there is a great deal of innovation and anticipation taking place in this space. When I think about how you use a tablet (e.g., less than an arm’s length away but a relatively fixed distance) it seems to by crying out for glasses free 3D – if you could only spare the power.