Day 3 at HP Discover continues

Day 3 at HP Discover was brilliant, the highlight for me was speaking with the head of operations from DreamWorks, Ryan Granard, as well as some interesting presentations from David Donatelli, Todd Bradley from HP, Stouffer Egan from Autonomy and Kimberley S. Stevenson from Intel.

David Donatelli – Executive Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Group

David spoke to us about the continued innovation that HP has been making in their server platforms, during which he mentioned the three key projects:

• Project Moonshot -focusing on server design and innovation to deliver more energy efficient, lower cost and more accessible servers for business.
• Project Odyssey – unifying the best of Mission Critical and x86 technologies to innovate both offerings for next generation enterprise platforms.
• Project Voyager – delivering the latest innovations from the HP Proliant Gen8 servers which resulted in them being faster to deploy, more proactive through more effective monitoring, simple through easier provisioning and management.

He then spoke about the unique benefits of the HP StoreOnce offering which delivers not only high performance backups at up to 100TB per hour, but equally impressive restores – very impressive, being able to restore data has in past experience frequently been an issue. There are two key architectures, one for storage (3PAR) and the other for backups/restores (HP StoreOnce). Next was coverage of the innovations in the HP networking space, talking about how HP had continued to improve their network offering with a focus on reliability and scalability, mentioning as well their HP TippingPoint solutions which has led to HP becoming a leader in vulnerability identification and remediation.

Todd Bradley – Executive Vice President, Printing and Personal Systems Group

Todd Bradley explained how HP have been renewing focus on their printing and Personal Systems Group, discussing the changes in this business and challenges as from new markets and a changing world. The key three products being:

• HP t410 All in One Smart Zero Client,
• HP LaserJet Pro 400 MFP
• HP EliteBook Folio

He then moved on to discuss and illustrate their new HP Envy Spectre XT range comparing its functionality with that of the MacBook Air.

Stouffer Egan, from Autonomy

Spoke about and explained the context behind structured and unstructured data, with some brilliant onstage examples, the key one being holding an iPad with a camera pointed at an Iron Man poster, when he did this Iron Man appeared on stage! Also when pointed at a HP network switch, the video overlaid showing how to install a network cable as part of the initial setup.

Kimberley S. Stevenson, Vice President, Intel

Kimberley spoke to us about how Intel is participating in this new world of social media, what challenges they see facing the enterprise in terms of big data, structured and unstructured data, how Intel continued their platform innovation to deliver even better more energy efficient and higher performance products to meet the need to scale up and right size infrastructure.

Blogger sessions

We had several blogger sessions covering HP NonStop, Mission Critical and their new Generation 8 servers, it was interesting to get some more background information and be able to speak to executives and engineers about the products and what HP has to offer in this space.

Ryan Granard, DreamWorks Annimations

Ryan Granard popped into speak with us giving some context and real world examples of how DreamWorks Animation was using HP technology to deliver their infrastructure, create opportunity for its artists and in turn revenue generation. He was very informative, very engaging and open about the different technologies they had used, some key statements are noted below:

• ‘.. we were reaching the limits with our existing networking technology and offering, we haven’t yet reached those limits with the HP Networking technology, it’s very good’
• ‘.. the average film is 50-60 million render hours, we can leverage the cloud to offload about 20% of this..’
• ‘.. an entire film could be up to 800 million files’  when they talk backups, ‘we need to backup the stack, the files, the packages, the scripts and everything that we used to create and process those files’ – illustrating the volumes and challenges DreamWorks faces.

He also mentioned their frank relationship with HP including their issues about adoption of flat panel displays which resulted in the HP DreamColor series of displays, as they had previously been stock piling CRTs as the existing flat panel displays did not have the colour depth and range that they needed.  HP relationship and engineers, allowed this to be researched and resolved.

At this point, I’d like to thank Ryan very much for his insight and patience as we asked him a range of questions from how he used technology at DreamWorks, what his challenges were through to corporate social responsibility and computer recycling!

Category: Cloud, Conferences, News, Servers