Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

As a first step in the companies' expanded relationship, VMware would work with HP to integrate HP BTO software with VMware vCenter Lab Manager, which provides self-service access to a library of pre-configured virtualized application environments, allowing teams of users to check out systems on-demand while IT maintains administrative control. With Lab Manager, organizations can reduce hardware costs, automate manual provisioning tasks, and accelerate application development and test cycles. In addition, VMware and HP would jointly develop and bring to market enhanced virtualization management offerings for VMware vCenter and HP BTO customers based on the HP BTO application and infrastructure discovery technologies (HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping) to better manage their VDC-OS environments. A VDC-OS enables businesses to efficiently pool all types of hardware resources (including servers, storage and network) into an "internal enterprise cloud" that acts like a sin...

HP today announced the expansion of its virtualized browsing solution across select business desktop products and its plans to introduce Linux as an operating system choice for business desktop customers. The offerings are designed to help small businesses enhance their productivity and ease their management of technology. The first-of-its-kind Mozilla Firefox for HP Virtual Solution was developed with Symantec and Mozilla for HP customers. The solution uses the standard release of Mozilla Firefox with a Symantec Software Virtualization Solution layer that allows customers to use the Internet productively while keeping business PCs stable and easier to support. As customers surf the web, changes made to the PC are contained in a “virtual layer,” separate from the operating system, and do not permanently alter the machine. Customers can therefore reset the browser as needed, instantly returning the PC to its last-known good state. Previously offered on the HP Compaq dc7900 Bus...

So, Big Blue cranked up its PR machine, and pulled some statistics out of its, er, sales database and wanted everyone to know that more than 5,000 companies worldwide have replaced iron from HP, Sun Microsystems, and EMC since 2004 and moved to them to IBM alternatives. Breaking this down a little, IBM is claiming that in less than one year, more than 150 customers have moved onto its System z mainframes from HP and Sun platforms. When pressed for more details about where these customers were coming from, IBM's PR people said they would get me some answers, but all I got was static. And since the inception of the so-called Migration Factory that IBM set up "several years ago," more than 1,300 customers have been moved to Power-based servers from Sun and HP platforms, and this year alone, another 800 customers have moved onto System x iron (which presumably also includes BladeCenter blade servers). Yes, IBM is mixing different categories and different time scales, but this...

Vendors are gunning for diminutive businesses in the hope that as some build their small start-ups into beefy companies the bosses will stay loyal to the tech they started out with. Just don’t mention the economy, stupid. Microsoft and HP will offer US customers products, training and deployment services for storage, networking and something they have dubbed “server consolidation”. The tech beasts claimed that the tie-in will help customers decrease costs, increase biz agility, improve data access and protection, and raise employee productivity. Which is a big ask. Meanwhile, Hyper-V and MS System Centre support has been added to the industry-standard HP Virtual Connect 10Gb Flex-10 module that works with the Flex-1o NIC found, handily enough for HP, in its sparkly new ProLiant BL495c virtualisation blade server. There’s also a HP and Microsoft partner program, “Frontline”, aimed at Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Microsoft claimed that it has already registered 60 per c...

Hewlett-Packard said Tuesday it will offer software from NetSuite in San Mateo so that small businesses can manage their operations online -- including inventories, order fulfillment, customer relationships and e-commerce. NetSuite competes with Salesforce.com in San Francisco, except that it specializes in software for businesses with 1,000 employees or less, said NetSuite vice president Mini Peiris. It attracted HP's attention because its data center runs on HP hardware, and HP is trying to figure out how to do more with offering software over the Web, a method called cloud computing, she said. Source

``The question is, do I have too much in one bucket?'' said Szygenda, who has overseen GM's technology budget for more than a decade. ``Down deep, economics tells me I need some more diversity.'' He stressed that the carmaker has no plans to seek new suppliers immediately. Hewlett-Packard, led by Chief Executive Officer Mark Hurd, has pledged to offer the same amount of value in spite of the lack of competition for orders, Szygenda said yesterday. ``We understand GM's concerns and are committed to working with them to address those concerns,'' Jeff Kelly, senior vice president of the Americas region at Hewlett-Packard's EDS unit, said in an e-mailed statement. Szygenda, 60, is seeking to reduce expenses as GM struggles to increase cash flow amid a global credit crunch and the lowest U.S. car sales in 15 years. Pitting technology suppliers against one another for contracts has helped save GM $12 billion over the past decade, he said. GM rose 18 cents,...

Developed by HP, the HP Halo Video Collaboration Service will be available for the full range of TANDBERG conferencing systems, including TANDBERG Total Telepresence offerings. The service also will be made available for videoconferencing offerings from other vendors. HP and TANDBERG also are expanding their reseller agreement to give more customers additional flexibility and choice in purchasing collaboration products and services. With these announcements, made at HP's 2008 Annual Imaging and Printing Conference, HP and TANDBERG are offering customers one of the most robust portfolios of collaboration products and services on the market today, ultimately helping customers increase enterprise-wide productivity and realize total resource savings. "Our new managed service offering allows traditional video conferencing customers to experience a level of service and return on investment that other vendors only promise," said David Murphy, senior vice president, Imaging a...

We are really curious what this project's outcome will be. I'd love to conenct to any of the above mentioned parties. A handful of Silicon Valley's biggest tech names are teaming up on a cloud computing project. HP, Intel and Yahoo are pooling their resources to create a half-dozen new cloud computing centers for researchers. These centers will be powered by massive computers, big enough to support data-intensive research into cloud computing. Cloud computing is a Silicon Valley buzzword that essentially refers to software that exists and is managed online, like Salesforce, Yahoo Maps and Google Documents, for example. HP, Intel and Yahoo have already poured millions of dollars into cloud computing. No word yet on how much this latest collaboration will cost. Source

HP today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire LeftHand Networks Inc., a leading provider of storage virtualization and iSCSI storage area network (SAN) solutions. LeftHand Networks' solutions enable midsize companies and remote offices or branches of large corporations to easily and cost-effectively protect critical business data. HP has agreed to purchase LeftHand Networks for $360 million in cash, subject to certain purchase price adjustments. Founded in 1999, LeftHand Networks is privately held and headquartered in Boulder, Colo. It has 215 employees and more than 500 resellers and distributors worldwide. The company has more than 11,000 installations across 3,000 different customers. A pioneer of iSCSI SAN technology, LeftHand Networks delivers scalable storage software on industry-standard hardware that supports existing technology environments. LeftHand Networks' portfolio extends HP virtualization solutions to the midmarket with software that runs on...

I have been toying and observing the markets for quite a while. Back in 2003, I ran a poll calling them mega-megers. HP, Sun, Oracle, Microsoft etc were involved in the poll. I did get quite a few responses then. First lets me tell you why this may happen. Simple as market is consolidating aggression. Several firms are doing the same things in different ways. Differentiation is there but over-capacitization and saturation of innovation limits are reached. Innovation Trap : Many firms are at the brink of the proverbial S-curve (as Clayton explained in his book: Innovator's Dilemma). Many firms need to shelve products that resemble and work on newer products. Innovation budgets cannot be in Billions of dollars anymore. Things change, so will the strategy. Call it CrowdInnovation , which is taking some form today, will still need to be contained as some IP Container will need to be locked and sealed as firms/Nations/Communities would want to retin their identities via product portfoli...

"We first designed the product specifically for streaming media and for static media. We've got a company called Snapfish, and they have over 5 billion online images. We were kind of thinking of them when we designed it, and it wouldn't take much to go from static to streaming media, and it actually works really well for that," Haberkorn said. But as HP has started to show the ExDS to potential customers, more ways of using it have come to light, including oil and gas companies that want to use it for seismic research. But in the end, many industries are thinking of ways to handle fast data growth. Most likely companies that are interested in the new system have already looked at their old kind of storage, but have found it too expensive, that it takes up too much space or uses too much power for what they want to do, according to Haberkorn. "Maybe they want to start an online backup servi...

Hewlett-Packard Co., the world's largest maker of personal computers, plans to eliminate about 24,600 jobs over three years as part of its integration of Electronic Data Systems Corp. The reduction amounts to about 7.5 percent of the workforce, Hewlett-Packard said today in a statement. It expects to incur $1.7 billion in costs this quarter for the cuts. Hewlett-Packard and EDS have about 320,000 employees combined. Chief Executive Officer Mark Hurd paid $13.2 billion for EDS to more than double revenue at its services group, which manages corporate computer networks and data centers. Combined, the companies' service units had more than $38 billion in sales last year. The cuts are the biggest undertaken by Hurd, who eliminated 15,000 positions to revive profit after becoming as CEO in 2005. ``A headcount reduction over a multiyear period makes sense,'' said Michael Cuggino, who manages about $3.8 billion at Pacific Heights Asset Management in San Francisco, including 3...

Given that HP ships 50M pcs worldwide annually. They might just give Microsoft a very hard time. Market is changing dramatically and its just about as devious around the detours. Why is all this happening: Globalization Middle-class rising/New consumers are joining Fat PC/Desktops are dying Thin, smaller units are emerging Cloud computing will go and grow massively as demand increases, money spreads across billions of wallets and as big enterprises freeze and consolidate, newer ones open. This is what I call the Great Jar'ing! Policy makers will have to ensure that this is regulated for fair trade. Generational shift is happening Back to the story of BusinessWeek: WEANING FROM WINDOWS? Still, the sources say employees in HP's PC division are exploring the possibility of building a mass-market operating system. HP's software would be based on Linux, the open-source operating system that is already widely available, but it would be simpler and easier for mainstream users, t...

Visibility is a critical aspect to find vulnerabilities in a system, and without the correct security and management tools, threats can easily gain access through an organisation's valuable data center, Brindley says. “The area HP focuses on is service automation and visibility. We've seen a significant growth of virtualisation within data centres. Businesses have got to maintain excellence in all of the domains to manage risk.” Organisations must factor in security issues and the three domains of strategy, application and operations in virtualised environments, he says. “When securing a hypervisor, best practices need to be applied. With the proliferation of virtual platforms – there's been a significant shift in technology, and policies and procedures need to be implemented. Source

XaaS = Everything as a Service and this is when the Virtualization 4.0 eventually hands over the reigns to the new age of UMCC or Unified Modular Cloud Computing . Having done that we will be doing things in variety of ways. (Reading my blog and searching for "ideation", "globalization", "strategy" etc will lead you to more articles I've written about the coming of the Ideation Age ) According to HP (Shane, the CSO's blog), the five trends to watch are: As we move from the desktop model to the cloud and a world where everything will be delivered as a service, there are five trends that we at HP believe are worth paying close attention to: The digital world will converge with the physical world: Back in 1995, the mantra was, “Everything is virtual. Geography is irrelevant.” But from now on, factors such as your physical location mean a lot. Cloud services will be increasingly aware of the context you’re in, right down to details such as the ti...

This is indeed shocking for HP ( NYSE:HP ). HP has a big challenge of integrating EDS and the time it needs to do it will also tell how many new contracts they can keep. In this deal HP was supposed to dave $1 Billion for its (now lost) client. I guess people in DT got smarter and did the math themselves. These days a lot of firms are asking for independent advise. In the past months I have done a lot of calls myself to discuss deal that were as big as $500 Million to some multi-billion mergers/acquisitions. So why would someone ask a lone ranger, a nutcase blogger about it for advise. The answer was simple: They preferred to invest horizontally and vertically across several domains rather than just asking Gartner or any other advisor firm. A lot of firms lately are taking advise from independent consultants and advisors. Obviously I do feel proud at times when I see an international announcement of a merger, acquisition or other investment is where I participated as well. Anyways back...

Hardware and services giant Hewlett-Packard, chip-maker Intel and web portal Yahoo! are to build “a globally distributed, Internet-scale testing environment”. This will comprise six giant data centres, located around the world and based mainly on HP and Intel kit, each containing between 1,000 and 4,000 processor cores. This platform will be used as a test bed for experimental ‘cloud computing’ services. Research partners include the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. “With this test bed, not only can researchers test applications at Internet scale, they will also have access to the underlying computing systems to advance understanding of how systems software and hardware function in a cloud environment,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research.

EDS has been charged with "streamlining and enhancing" people's use of government online services, including log-on access to the Australian Taxation Office, Medicare and Centrelink, as well as links to jobs, business opportunities, health, travel and other departmental resources. Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner said people were frustrated by the need to visit multiple websites to get the information and services they need, "and have repeatedly requested simple access. Surveys have shown the present arrangements are too rigid, too hard to find, and often use complex language that's hard to understand". Over four years, EDS will develop online accounts for individuals, allowing a central log-on and interaction with a range of agencies, as a one stop shop. But Australians will not be compelled to use the online account as services offered through the site will be "strictly opt-in", Mr Tanner said in a statement. News here...

The message from HP is that it wants to deliver more efficiently used assets. "Everything has to be saved now," says Phil Dodsworth, director of HP Datacentre Solutions. That means energy efficiency, power and cooling and lowering operating costs, he adds. "Our strategy is all about managing risk for our clients, and we manage risks through these processes. It's not a silver bullet." HP sees virtualisation as an important strand in what it wants to deliver - but that is a long way from the full story. "Every other supplier seems to imagine that virtualisation is a cure all for everything," says Dodsworth, "but some applications don't lend themselves to virtualisation at all." HP's strategy is very much cost-driven rather than technology-led. "That's what our customers have been telling us," says Dodsworth. "It's the cost of the datacentre that is crippling companies, not the strategic advantages that technolo...

This is the news: Hewlett-Packard will become the second-largest technology services company after IBM with a deal announced Tuesday to buy Electronic Data Systems for $13.9 billion. With revenue of $22.1 billion last fiscal year, EDS of Plano, Texas, gives HP instant scale and a seat at the big table for large contracts. HP's own services unit brought in $16.6 billion last fiscal year. Together, the two companies will have about 210,000 employees with reach in 80 countries and will be a firm challenger to IBM. HP's purchase price values EDS stock at $25 per share, a 32.6 percent premium over EDS' closing price of $18.85 on Friday, before news of the merger talks. HP said the agreement has the full backing of both companies' boards and is expected to close by the end of the year. According to HP, the purchase price includes $13.25 billion paid on 529.9 million units of outstanding common shares, options and restricted stock, as well as $640 million adjusted for the ...