It’s been a pretty interesting day here at my first HP Discover, and I thought I would jot down a few thoughts about the day. Many of my opinions and thoughts are slightly biased by the fact that I also attended my first VMworld only last month, at the same venue, so it has been very interesting to compare the differences…
The first thing that really jumped out at me is the level at which the conference appears to be targeted, from a technical perspective. There is definitely a much more business user focussed feel to the event, with many more “people in suits” around, though still plenty of opportunity to get your geek on with the engineers in the Discover Zone. This seems to be reflected in the content at the sessions I have attended so far, which seem to be more around business objectives and solution value, rather than deep dive technical specifics. I guess part of this is driven by the target audience, and part by the vast array of HP products represented. There simply isn’t enough time or space to be able to deep dive on every HP product!
HP Discover at Fira Barcelona Gran Via
Speaking of space, although HP Discover is only slightly larger than VMworld (around 11,000 attendees vs 9,000), they actually utilise halls 4 & 5 of the Fira Barcelona Gran Via as well at halls 6 to 8.1. If you thought you had sore dogs by the end of VMworld, you can multiply that up by another 50% for HP Discover; the place is simply vast! If I am fortunate enough to be invited back next year, I may have to try to sneak in a scooter!
It’s Mahooosive!
My morning was mainly spent taking in a few sessions including a very interesting panel discussion on SDN, Network virtualisation and BYOD, hosted by the inimitable Ethan Banks (of PacketPushers).
Keynote
For me, the keynotes continued the themes I have mentioned above.
I wont go into all of the specifics of all of the announcements as I’m sure there will be plenty on the blogosphere who will do it better justice than I can, but there were a couple of bits and bobs which were particularly interesting to me personally and I recommend people check out, including:
- 3PAR 7200c/7440c/7450c
The new 3PAR 7000c line of mid tier arrays, which has been evolved somewhat with the usual increases in capacity, but more interestingly, the ability to present both block and file direct from the controllers using the new file personas feature which the LonVMUG’s own Craig Kilborn did a great intro on. The pricing looks interesting too at $129 per TB, which even at list price would be very good value as long as you don’t have to license all of the usable storage in your array, whether you need it or not; something I want to find out asap! 🙂
- HP Enterprise Services for Office 365
At a high level this seems to be the ability to have HP manage your Office 365 environment either within the standard MS DCs, or potentially within an HP DC. For me this is a step in the right direction, but where it would get really interesting would be if they could extend it all they way out to a customer DC, where I could then potentially look to use things like Exchange in Online Mode, for compatibility with remote desktops (RDS/XenApp etc).
In the afternoon I spent some time in the Discover Zone having a chat with a number of technology experts. A couple of nuggets which stuck for me were:
- HP will (at last) be providing a Storage Spaces certified JBOD solution early next year; something they have been missing for no discernable reason.
- DL80 servers now have dual PSU capability if purchased as a CTO SKU. If all you need is a bunch of compute hosts for your vSphere farm, booting from USB and using FC/iSCSI storage, then you wouldn’t go far wrong considering these, or even the DL60 range…
In the evening I attended the UK&I Customer Reception at the W Barcelona, which was highly enjoyable, thanks HP!
Overall, a very interesting and enjoyable day one event, and great to see HP still continuing to innovate. By the time I hit my room this evening, both my feet and brain were tired out!
Tomorrow I plan to take in some more sessions, have a nose around the tech preview zone at some point and revisit one or two of the converged systems stands, as well as have a play with OneView.
A RedHat Red Hat!
PS – Marketing award of the day has to go to the guys from RedHat. You couldn’t look anywhere without seeing a sea of Scarlet Fedoras within hours of the start of the day! Must try to grab one tomorrow for my kids… 🙂
Disclaimer: As an HP customer, HP kindly provided my accommodation and entry to the HP discover event, but there was no expectation or request for me to write about their products or services.