HP Blades Day 1

My first day was spent at the HP Campus speaking with the team and learning about a number of things including Data Center trends for 2010, HP servers being used in the production in the film Avatar, and an interesting presentation from Nth Generation Computing. Following that was a presentation about HP Virtual Connect, something that I have been interested in amongst other things.  The BladeSystem sessions in the lab was very cool, we went over the different HP blade offerings and there was a demonstration of HP’s Insight software, in particular their Dynamic Power Control. Dynamic Power Control is part of their Systems Management technologies which allows you to adjust the power utilization of the server by adjusting the clock speed of the processor, so for example in the event of a power or air conditioning failure, you could select to reduce the power consumption of the non production or non client facing systems to reduce your power load and therefore cooling requirements. System administrators can create groups of servers by platform, location or specific values and then apply rules to those groups, furthering the ability to manage remote sites or plan for specific events, like a data center power down.

Over lunch I had a conversation with some of the guys from HP about their support, about making things easier, it was great to hear their feedback. We then had a walk through discussion about BladeSystems Matrix which is an innovative solution for improving deployment times something many a CIO speaks about, and then the competitive discussion, discussing the features of each of the blade vendors and how HP is different, or what their competitive advantage is, it’s an interesting topic – though I have always wondered about comparing features, it can do one of two things, turn off your audience, or preach to the converted, but then that could be me being emotional. It was interesting nonetheless and reminded me about the different features and concepts around blade technology.

I’ve published more photos on flickr.

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