The event yesterday was very good value in learning HP's strategies & directions. HP's catchword was 'Adaptive Enterprise'

Themes:
-- Adaptive Enterprise (flexibility & adapdability being the drivers)
-- 'Virtualisation' of resources
-- 'On Demand' ability to instantly expand capacity if needed
-- Platform consolidation strategy. Reduce # of HP chipsets & OSes
-- Configuration flexibility

************************************************************************

Some key points learned from the event include ...

- That HP are consolidating their multiple platforms down to two hardware chips & 3 systems platforms
o Current hardware architectures include MIPS (NonStop), Alpha (exDEC), 32-bit Intel, Itanium, PA-Risc.
o Future chipsets will be 32-bit Intel & Itanium and OS will be Windows, Linux, Non-Stop.
o The 3 standardised platforms will be Windows (32-bit) Pro-Liant, Integrity (Itanium), Non-Stop (Itanium)

PA-Risc will go thru a few more iterations but will be phased out in favour of Itanium. HPUX appears destined to be replaced by Linux (same fate as IBM's AIX). The Linux message was strong but they didn't make a big deal of phasing out HPUX but that came across as a 'work-it-out-for-yourself' thing. (HP & IBM are embarking on a world tour to promote their support for Linux systems).

HP said many of the same things IBM is saying in regard to 'on-demand' computing. On-demand is the ability to expand systems capacity as needed to hande peaks in demand. HP have a similar 'on-demand' strategy for pay-per-use for processors & memory. In this scheme (kind of a lease) you rent/lease a machine with 16 processors but only use 12. The others can be activated 'on-demand' but when they are you are billed for the additional use. HP (like IBM) will only sell this type of config to a company that is likely to use it (peak loads & Fail-over use). The price for this type of facility is higher than for a single machine with max processors. They are also moving to common rack-mount components & expandable computing using blades (again same as IBM announced with Power5). They are deploying a new processor module that allows two Itaniums where there used to be one. This allows HP to scale from 2 to 128 processor MP configs (as does IBM's Power5 strategy).

HP talked a lot about 'virtualisation' of all resources. They say that virtualisation is intended to manage & eliminate excess capacity. (comms, processors, OSes). They mention nPARs (which I assume is the same as IBMs LPAR logical partition technology). The say their management software is heading toward a single management module (as distinct from seperate management modules for comms, storage, processors etc:).

HP also said they with be expanding their SAN capability as well as introducing a SATA cheap storage facility that has dual fibre channel access but is low performance (72,000 rpm cheap ATA disks vs 15000 rpm high-reliability disks etc: etc:).

HP mentioned the move toward GRID computing as an outcome of their virtual resource management.

A lot of the presentations came across as futures & it is up to us customers to accept that HP have the ability to execute the strategies.

In hindsight, the themes are very similar to IBM's recent Power5 announcements but only the chipsets & the actual implementaion software differ. The themes are then, the common Vendor view of IT as it is evolving.

Doug Marker