HP advances public cloud as part of ambitious hybrid cloud strategy
After a year of chatter and several months of private beta testing, HP today announced the public beta of its public cloud services, which the company is billing as part of its overarching hybrid cloud-solution dubbed HP Converged Cloud.
HP Cloud Services -- built on OpenStack, HP Converged Infrastructure, and other HP-grown software -- aims to deliver an open-source public cloud infrastructure. HP's Cloud Services comprise five core components: HP Cloud Compute, HP Cloud Object Storage, and HP Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN), which will enter public beta on May 10, and HP Cloud Block Storage and HP Cloud Relational Database (RDB), which will enter private beta the same day. Read more...
HP’s server strategy focuses on SSDs, storage bottleneck
Hewlett-Packard says it will address the I/O bottleneck created by internal and external storage in its next generation of ProLiant servers, boosting performance by up to 50 percent for popular applications such as OLTP (online transaction processing) and streaming video.
HP said in two separate blog posts that its upcoming ProLiant Gen8 server line will offer SSDs (solid-state drives) in combination with a data caching algorithm that it calls Dynamic Workload Acceleration . Read more...
Meg Whitman fluffs HP’s age, gets corrected by shareholder
Meg Whitman has spent her first six months at Hewlett-Packard talking to customers and employees and learning how the business works, but apparently she didn't get much of a history lesson.
"HP will be 70 in 2014," she said proudly at HP's annual shareholder meeting Wednesday. Few Silicon Valley companies can boast such longevity, she said, and her job now is to set HP up for "the next 70 years."
It's a line Whitman's been using for the past few months as she tries to drum up enthusiasm for the new, reinvigorated HP she hopes to build. The only trouble is, it appears to be wrong, as an elderly shareholder gently pointed out to her.
"I believe HP was founded in 1939," he said during the question-and-answer session after her talk. Wouldn't that make HP 75 in 2014? Read more...
HP cuts 275 jobs as webOS transitions to open-source
Hewlett-Packard has cut 275 jobs in its webOS group, as part of its strategy to turn the operating system over to the open-source community, a source said Tuesday.
HP said last year that it would stop making devices that use the operating system which was developed by Palm for phones and tablets, and later decided to release the software under the Apache License 2.0. HP had acquired Palm in 2010.
As webOS continues the transition to open-source software, HP no longer needs many of the engineering and other related positions that it required before, the company said in a statement on Tuesday. "This creates a smaller and more nimble team that is well-equipped to deliver an open source webOS and sustain HP's commitment to the software over the long term," it added. Read more...
HP caught with SIX Windows 8 PC packages up its sleeve
Windows 8 is being re-packaged into six versions in a move that looks like it might kill off four editions of the desktop client currently sold.
Documents posted on PC-partner Hewlett-Packard’s website here and picked up here say Windows 8 will come as a Windows 8 32- and 64-bit Edition, and an Enterprise and Professional Edition – both in 32-and 64-bit flavors.
It’s not clear, based on these documents, whether these are all the SKUs Microsoft has planned for the forthcoming Windows 8 or whether these are just the versions of Windows 8 that will be available on machines sold by HP.
If this is everything, then it’s almost certainly the end of Windows 7 Ultimate at the high end and also of Windows 7 Home Premium and Home Basic. Read more...
Whitman gives HP harsh report card, outlines recovery plan
Hewlett-Packard has underinvested in its business and become "too complex and too slow," President and CEO Meg Whitman said Wednesday, offering a three-part turnaround plan to get the ailing company back on track.
Speaking to analysts and investors after HP released its financial results, Whitman offered a frank assessment of HP's challenges at the end of her first full quarter on the job.
It was a tough three months for HP, which saw its profit dive 44 percent and revenue decline by 7 percent. Its giant Personal Systems Group, where revenue skidded 15 percent, needs to build more innovative PCs, Whitman said.
"The fact is that, for all that's right with PSG, we underinvested in innovation in the last several years and we've been late to market too often," Whitman said. Read more...
HP gives Vertica a fresh face
Hewlett-Packard's Vertica subsidiary has updated its real-time analytics software, giving it a graphical user interface and connectivity to big-data-styled analysis systems.
The Vertica Analytics Platform is a column oriented analytic database, one designed for rapidly ingesting and structuring large amounts of data for quick analysis. "Our use case is focused primarily on real-time analytics," said Scott Howser, Vertica's vice president of product marketing. Internet companies such as Zynga and GroupOn both use Vertica for quick analysis of user behaviors, he said; he expects that an increasing number of organizations will require this type of immediate analysis to better serve their customers.
HP purchased Vertica last year. It has since integrated Vertica with its Autonomy IDOL software, another 2011 HP acquisition, for a single solution, called the HP Next Generation Information Platform, that analyzes both structured and unstructured data. Read more...
HP gives sysadmins a little mobility
HP is embracing mobility with apps to allow sysadmins to receive alerts, manage systems and even shut down servers, all from the comfort of their booth seats at the pub.
HP already provides SiteScope, with which one can monitor servers and receive alerts on Android and iOS devices. But in a presentation at the HP Global Partner event in Las Vegas the company promised a good deal more functionality would be coming to mobile clients. Read more...
HP shares database smarts with EnterpriseDB
EnterpriseDB is trying to pump up the PostgreSQL database to do battle with Oracle 11g and, to a lesser extent, IBM's DB2 and Microsoft's SQL. So the database upstart is upgrading its Postgres Plus Advanced Server 9.1 - and kicking it onto Amazon's EC2 compute cloud to peddle it alongside Amazon's own Relational Database Service.
As El Reg previously reported, the open source PostgreSQL relational database was updated to the 9.1 release level last September, with a lot of the work being done by a team at EnterpriseDB, which has become the "Red Hat for PostgreSQL," led by Robert Haas, the senior architect at the company. Read more...
HP releases Android TouchPad kernel, CyanogenMod to see improved features
Despite never officially releasing an Android-powered TouchPad, HP has gifted the Android kernel on which it based prototype versions of its tablet to CyanogenMod, the team behind the Ice Cream Sandwich port for the now cancelled device.
webOSNation reports that when HP was shipping out TouchPads faster than you could say ‘Firesale’, it mistakenly sent a few tablets running an older version of Android to customers, highlighting the fact it had tested the platform within its labs. Read more...
Clues about HP’s Gen8 servers leaked
Hewlett-Packard has let slip some details on its website about its upcoming Proliant Gen8 servers ahead of their official launch.
The pages list basic details of single- and dual-socket BL, ML and DL Gen8 servers, which will be based on Intel's upcoming Xeon E5 processors.
One system, the single-socket ProLiant BL460c, is a small-form-factor server based on Intel's E5-2650L processor.
Some servers will have HP's latest networking, I/O, storage and management capabilities, according to results that show up during a search of HP's website. The pages the results are supposed to lead to have been removed from the site. Read more...
Oracle handed setback in HP Itanium case
A court in California rejected Oracle's bid to use a fraud claim to undo an agreement to support the Itanium processor, that it is said to have made with Hewlett-Packard.
"The alleged fraud did not prevent Oracle from participating in the negotiations or deprive Oracle of the opportunity to negotiate," Judge James P. Kleinberg of the Superior Court of California, Santa Clara County said in a 21-page ruling on Monday.
The Judge was referring to HP's settlement agreement in 2010 with Mark Hurd, former CEO of HP, who later joined Oracle as president. Although Oracle was not a party to the previous litigation by HP against Hurd, its participation in the Hurd litigation settlement negotiations was extensive, he added. Read more...
HP’s open-sourcing of webOS begins today
The last time we heard about webOS, HP had opted to open-source the mobile platform, letting developers take a stab at breathing some life into it. It was an unconventional move, but not necessarily a bad one: it puts the platform largely in the hands of the development community, and it doesn’t require a large investment.
Today we found out more about HP’s plans for the second coming of webOS. The first step of the open sourcing process, the release of the Enyo application framework, took place today. The entire process is expected to be completed by September of this year. Upon completion of the open-sourcing transition, it will be known as Open webOS 1.0. Read more...
HP palms £316m in DWP desktop deal
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has awarded a significant desktop management contract to HP under the Desktop 21 framework agreement.
The five-year £316m Desktop 21 deal covers a range of desktop services including security, print, service desk and device provision and support, and will see the DWP move to HP's WorkPlace360 desktop management platform from 2013.
HP will begin work immediately to put in place the infrastructure needed to support Desktop 21, before moving on to virtualise DWP's desktop applications on a rolling programme, according to the DWP.
HP will then begin the roll-out of the new desktop hardware, including the deployment of thin client devices, which will be able to "support full or partial moves to cloud services at DWP's discretion", the department told Guardian Government Computing. Read more...