HP

HP stock set to increase

Check out this article:

 http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2009/09…

How you might ask are they doing so well in the midst of economic downturn you might ask? Well it’s simple they cut their employee’s salaries, particularly from the EDS side. Now for all I know these employee’s salaries were bloated and needed pruning in any case, but I am just saying that if you are going to brag about how your profits are increasing maybe it should be from increased sales or better innovation or something like that.

Just saying…

Procurves and bi-directional port mirroring

Now I am just go to prefix this critique with the following, I have never designed a switch or am not aware of the total cost to add features to a switch. That being said I have a question for HP, would it really cost that much more to put bi-directional port mirroring into your switches instead of just ingress port mirroring? Is there such a huge cost to it? I mean its already watching packets flow in one direction is it really hard to make it watch the packets go in the other direction?

I mean I can accept that the old 4104 I was working with can’t do it. It doesn’t make sense really that it wasn’t there in the first place but it’s old yeah whatever I get it. However the brand new 1700’s and 1800’s can’t do it. The 2510 doesn’t but the 2610 does? Here is the other issue, your documentation. Both the 1800 and the 2610 say the same exact same thing in regards to port mirroring and yet one does ingress only and the other does bi-directional. I had to go through 3 sales reps to find someone who knew that.

Here is the kicker, every single cisco switch supports bi-directional port mirroring, hell, even in the Cisco/Linksys small business line, for the switches that support port mirroring it is bi-directional not just ingress.

Why HP, why?

Epic Technology Day - April 21st, 2009

For those not familiar with this event, my company hosts a bi-yearly technology day seminar. It’s a great free event with lots of interesting and informative seminars presented by companies like Cisco, VMware, Citrix, HP and others.  The next one is coming up on April 21st in Winnipeg and the 23rd in Saskatoon.

If you are going to be in one of these area’s you should register to come and take a look

Go here to check out the seminar list and to register:

 http://www.epic.ca/events.asp

HP ProLiant is Highest Performing Server in Latest VMmark Comparison

HP ProLiant is Highest Performing Server in Latest VMmark Comparison

Check out the results here:
http://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/results.html

The HP servers scored the highest performance results when running VMware in comparison to multiple other vendors including Dell and IBM. Certainly some food for thought when purchasing your next physical server.

HP cutting wages

You can read the full story here:

 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/19/…

However I just wanted to add my two cents to this story. I think bad quarterly earning reports are to be expected for most hardware vendors at this point. The truth is that HP really needs to diversify their business a bit into the service industry.  From what I understand the industry magic number is 30/70. Thirty percent service revenue and 70 percent sales. Now obviously HP understands this and that’s why they bought EDS, however rather than cutting employee pay which will pretty much guarantee they will loose some of their best people, they should really focus on some heavy lay-offs on the EDS side and then amalgamate the business.

Installing HP Insight Manager on a ESX box

I found this very useful blog entry on instaling the HP SIM on ESX. The HP site has the install files but no acutal instructions on how to do the install. This can be very useful because as a consultant we rely on the ability to remotely administer servers but this is useful for any administrator.  Check it out;

 http://discardme.com/blog/2009/01/22/ins…