Image via CrunchBase

I am in Madrid this week, as a guest of Hewlett Packard. The company’s European roadshow, Technology@Work, is in town for two days, showing existing and prospective customers some of the ways in which HP’s Converged Infrastructure can help them meet the growing challenge of continuing to grow IT capacity as data centres fill, power grids reach capacity, and budgets fall.

A few of us took the opportunity to sit down with Iain Stephen (VP Enterprise Storage and Servers, UK & Ireland) and Martin Riley (Programme Manager for Technology@Work) from HP yesterday evening, and the result is now available as a podcast. Also participating in the conversation were HP’s Becca Taylor,  Martin Macleod, Massimiliano Galeazzi, Patrick Husband, and Hans Vredevoort.

The conversation was recorded on a shiny new Ivy Worldwide Blue Snowball microphone that none of us had ever used before, in a room that was a little bigger than we’d have liked. All in all, though, I’m pleasantly surprised by the result. Have a listen, and see what you think.

Disclosure: our expenses were covered by Ivy Worldwide, on behalf of HP.

Image via CrunchBase

With apologies to Zanussi for the corny title, I had an interesting conversation with Axcient CEO Justin Moore and HP’s VP for Channel Strategy & SMB Meaghan Kelly about the issues of helping small and medium businesses cope with backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity.

Yesterday’s conversation was taking place in the context of today’s announcement from HP and Axcient; Axcient’s US data centres are moving to HP servers, networking and storage, and the appliance that the company puts on-site with customers will be an HP ProLiant server moving forward.

According to Moore, most SMBs use “4 or more” vendor solutions to “cobble together” a data protection solution. Basic application and data backup, disaster recovery from off-site backup, and business continuity in the event of hardware failure are all addressed separately, and it can be difficult to stitch the pieces together without dedicated — and expert — effort. I wonder how many companies, especially at the ‘S’ end of ‘SMB,’ simply give up on attempting anything but the most rudimentary on-site backup… and hope that nothing goes wrong?

Axcient’s solution is different, as the company offers a single appliance (an HP server, running Axcient’s applications) that can be deployed locally. There is no up-front cost for the appliance, with both it and the ongoing service being billed on a recurring monthly subscription. Software on the appliance handles backing up applications and data on servers, desktops and laptops across the business, and securely replicates changed data to one of Axcient’s US data centres for backup and disaster recovery. Should critical hardware fail within the business, a virtual machine can be started on the appliance to fulfil the role of the failed equipment until it is repaired or replaced. Indeed, Moore suggested that the ProLiant server they’ve selected would be capable of taking the place of up to seven servers if required; presumably with a perceptible loss of performance. Slow responses from a straining appliance are no doubt preferable to no response at all from seven dead servers.

Axcient’s data centres are currently in the United States, raising the spectre of PATRIOT Act, European Data Protection legislation, data territoriality and more for those of us outside the US. Moore recognises this issue, and says that the company is in the process of opening a Canadian data centre. Sites in Europe and elsewhere may well follow.

Both HP and Axcient are pitching this solution to the entire SMB market; that’s everything from the lone consultant operating out of a home office up to businesses employing 1,000 staff. They’re certainly right to address the whole market and the top end is probably more lucrative, especially for HP’s channel partners. I was particularly interested, though, in the value that this might deliver to small businesses struggling to do much more than replicate core data to an external hard drive under their desk. Here, the $150 per month ballpark that Moore mentioned is expensive, but perhaps a sound investment if data and systems are key to business success.

With their reliance upon asynchronous data connections and effectively consumer-grade connectivity, one significant issue for small businesses is the practicality of trickling all of their on-premise data slowly up to an Axcient data centre before they can begin to reap benefits. With their ‘rapid seeding service,’ Axcient appear to have thought of this. If connectivity issues mean that network-based methods to replicate all your on-premise data are going to be too slow, it’s possible to transfer the data to a storage device attached to the appliance, “ship that in a locked container” to an Axcient data centre, and have the data loaded there to be available within 48 hours. The incremental backups of new and changed blocks then take place over the network without causing issues. Simple, obvious, but a sign that Axcient appears to be considering the needs of their smaller customers.

I took a quick trip to the Catalan city of Barcelona earlier this month; surely the first time I’ve been to that city without seeing the sea. I was there as a guest of HP, to hear some of the latest happenings in their storage business.

Over two days, we heard plenty about the P9500 (one can only presume that, although the numbering sort of fits the product line, the product manager hadn’t really absorbed Arthur C Clarke‘s point), the acquisition of 3Par, and the importance of intelligently shuffling data from fast but expensive storage to slower but cheaper varieties of disk.

As others who were there, such as Chris Evans, Chris Mellor and Ilja Coolen covered much of the news, there’s no need for me to rehash that. And a special episode of the Infosmack podcast took shape in a Spanish hotel room for those who’d like to hear some immediate impressions.

I thought it was interesting to hear honest impressions from HP staff involved in the partnership with Hitachi that resulted in HP’s new P9500; impressions that seemed to be at odds with those some of my colleagues heard at a very similar Hitachi event just weeks earlier. Everyone seems to be clear that the P9500 (and the very similar VSP that Hitachi’s HDS sells) is essentially a piece of Hitachi hardware. There’s nothing particularly surprising about that. The quibbles are around the extent to which HP engineers were involved in the process that designed, refined and tested the pieces that ended up forming the final box. Things are complicated still further by competing assertions as to the value that some additional HP code delivers to their customers. Chris Mellor has more on the story over at The Register, quoting a response by HP’s Simon Brassington to Mellor’s original review of the P9500;

“your description of ‘slapping a label‘ on the VSP doesn’t do justice to the collaborative partnership that HP and HDS have enjoyed in developing these products over the last 12 years.”

Hitachi subsidiary HDS (which sells the VSP) appears to disagree, with Mellor going on to highlight very public differences of opinion as to who did what.

Possibly some genuine misunderstanding. Possibly some enthusiastic spin on incremental features. Possibly the realities of life in a global corporation, where individuals have incomplete views of work being done elsewhere in the hierarchy. Hopefully no attempt on either side to deliberately mislead anyone. Whatever, these partners maybe need to take a deep breath, grow up, and remember the benefits that each continues to gain from the other.

Away from sniping about who was most important in deciding the colour of the P9500′s paint job, I was intrigued to learn more about HP’s ongoing efforts to cram computers into shipping containers. They’re not the first to do this, but one of the announcements in Barcelona did suggest that the company is the first to take the process mainstream. With much talk of Henry Ford, they unveiled POD-works assembly line plants in Texas and Scotland. The US plant can spit out a server every 12 seconds, and deliver a fully configured POD container in as little as six weeks. Impressive stuff, and a conversation (in a POD, naturally) with HP’s Eva Beck suggests that there are plenty of customers interested in the proposition. According to Beck, around half of POD deployments are in the open air. The other half go into buildings that protect them from the elements; but these buildings are much cheaper to build and run than a traditional data centre with its air conditioning, raised floors, fire suppression systems and the like. In many cases, they’re simply empty warehouses.

Despite use of the internationally standardised shipping container (both those big ones and the wee ones you don’t see as often, to be terribly technical about it), there seems to be little interest in moving these things around very much. This makes some sense as, although the container itself can fit on the back of a lorry, servers tend not to like being moved very much… and the container has significant requirements for power and water that your average truck stop might struggle to meet.

I liked the idea behind the POD, and it was interesting to see the way in which HP – and real customers – are putting it to work. In many ways, though, I wonder if the shipping container is maybe too big? The economies of scale kick in when you ring up HP and order a complete pod, stuffed to the rafters with servers. That’s an awful lot of computing power, and it doesn’t play so well in an environment where incremental enhancements are being made to an existing IT infrastructure.

Surely there’s a market for something similar, but smaller? There may also be a market for something a little more rugged, so that it really can be used in different locations? Why not deploy a baby POD to a sporting event, a new office, or even a disaster area? Maybe we’ll get there one day. In the meantime, I look forward to hearing more stories of ways in which the current POD concept is being stretched.

And given all the talk of Henry Ford, why were none of the shipping containers we saw, either on screen or in the flesh, painted black?

Disclosure: HP paid my expenses on this trip. There was no expectation that I write this in return, and the words and sentiment are entirely my own.

Related articles

• HP leverages converged infrastructure across IT spectrum to simplify branch offices and container-based data centers (zdnet.com)
• HP builds assembly line for datacentres (v3.co.uk)
• HP Offers Path From HP 9000 to New Hardware (nytimes.com)
• Hitachi Data Systems launches Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (zdnet.com)
• HP launches assembly line for data center PODs (zdnet.com)
• HP Offers Path From HP 9000 to New Hardware (pcworld.com)

Russ Daniels is VP and CTO for Cloud Services Strategy at IT behemoth, Hewlett-Packard [HPQ]. In a recent conversation, which has just been released as a podcast, we discuss the various ways in which the Cloud impinges upon HP’s current and future business.

During our conversation, Russ talks about the obvious impact upon HP’s data centre and server operations, but also sheds light on some of the wider ramifications of current trends for a visible and multi-faceted brand such as HP. Last year’s acquisition of EDS is also discussed, and is clearly considered important in helping HP to market its range of services to Cloud-averse enterprise customers.

Show notes are available from Talis‘ Nodalities blog.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Cisco’s Data Center Moves: Who Wins, Who Loses? (gigaom.com)
• HP Confines the Cloud for Enterprises (gigaom.com)
• Sun gears up to try utility cloud again using somebody else’s datacenter (insidehpc.com)
• As hardware sales falter, Hewlett-Packard turns to services (cbc.ca)
• The Rise of the Mega Data Center (gigaom.com)

Twitter is aflutter once again this morning, this time over a Wall Street Journal suggestion that ‘IBM in talks to buy Sun.’ I am not able to comment on the veracity of the rumour itself, but it’s clear that Sun needs to do something in order to strengthen its position in a competitive market. Selling to IBM is certainly one route, but an easier one might be the provision of a more complete Sun-badged proposition.

Elsewhere on WSJ.com this morning, in news that seems extremely unlikely to be unconnected, Don Clark reports on Sun’s

“plans to offer its own cloud-style services. Sun also plans to offer software, as well as hardware, to other companies that want to build clouds.”

Alongside competitive enterprise server hardware and Sun’s widely used stable of open source software (Solaris, Java, MySQL, OpenOffice, etc), this latest announcement of ‘Sun Cloud Storage’ (equivalent to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, S3) and ‘Sun Cloud Compute’ (equivalent to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2) should make Sun a serious player in the Cloud Computing space in a way that their abortive network.com never really did.

So why is anyone discussing either a desire on Sun’s part to sell, or a desire on IBM’s part to consider buying?

I’ve greatly enjoyed the insights of Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, especially as enunciated most recently on his blog in two videos discussing community adoption of Sun’s open source software and the commercial models Sun deploys to monetise that community. Despite Jonathan’s arguments, though, it seems to me that Sun lacks a fundamental piece of the whole; an effective and highly visible professional services arm. IBM has this. HP, with the purchase of EDS, has this. Accenture and gang are this, but nothing makes them choose to use or recommend Sun over its competitors today.

As Jonathan discusses in the first of the videos I pointed to (YouTube version embedded below, in two parts), Sun has been successful in encouraging use and innovation around a suite of open source operating systems, tools and applications.

Indeed, it was little more than a year ago that the company announced plans to spend some $800 million in acquiring European open source web database company MySQL. The problem is that these solutions are all freely downloadable from the Web, and the inevitable professional services and consultancy work associated with enterprise delivery — which could generate so much revenue — goes to far more companies than just Sun.

Alongside the software, Sun has a competitive range of hardware offerings in the enterprise space, and sells these in competition with IBM, HP, Dell and the rest.

By omitting a compelling and enveloping professional services proposition, Sun damages its own ability to capitalise upon its software and hardware efforts. Potential customers download Sun software, and then run it on anything; Sun gets a very small slice of the hardware sales. Sun isn’t doing badly at selling hardware, but maybe a more rounded services proposition would enable them to do better, despite Jonathan’s points in the commercial innovation video.

With more emphasis on offering a comprehensive package of solutions — whilst not removing choice and the vibrant open source community of which Jonathan speaks — might Sun not be a more obvious choice for customers in need of services and support?

An acquisition might, as Larry Dignan writes, make sense. But there’s plenty of life left in a standalone Sun, too… if it can monetise more of those downloading free software or steer more of those who ‘just need a server’ towards one with a Sun badge on the front. Professional Services are the road to both.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Sun’s missing mojo: MIA until when? (news.cnet.com)
• IBM, Amazon foreshadow bevy of connecting clouds (news.cnet.com)
• Cisco’s Data Center Moves: Who Wins, Who Loses? (gigaom.com)
• Cisco’s Data Center Play Reinvents The Server (gigaom.com)
• Sun takes another swing at cloud computing (infoworld.com)
• Sun CEO: Open source = free advertising (news.cnet.com)
• Sun Microsystem Business Revenues (Latest Discovery) (it-sideways.com)
• Schwartz: Not worried about Sun’s future (infoworld.com)