A captivated audience
HP held its annual Tech Forum conference in Las Vegas this year, where more than 5,300 partner and customer attendees came from around the world.
During the opening keynote speech, Dave Donatelli, executive vice-president and general manager for HP enterprise servers, storage and networking, said one of the biggest challenges for customers today is IT sprawl.
Most customers are currently spending about 70 per cent of their overall IT budget on managing their existing infrastructure, while the remaining 30 per cent of their budget goes towards innovation.
Thanks to HP’s vision of a converged infrastructure, the company is helping customers to save costs and time using their solutions and technologies.
New HP data centre solutions target complexity, cost
By Maxine Cheung of Computer Dealer News
Converge, innovate and transform
The theme of this year’s Tech Forum event was to encourage organizations to “transform, converge and innovate” within their businesses by using HP’s converged infrastructures solutions and technologies.
Donatelli explained that 2010 is HP’s “biggest year ever” in terms of product launches. Some of the new solution and technology announcements include HP ProLiant G7 blandes and servers, HP Virtual Connect, HP BladeSystem Matrix, HP Intelligent Power Discovery and HP StoreOnce.
New technology and solutions announcements
As part of its new announcements, Donatelli spoke of HP’s new Data Center Smart Grid, which he said is an “intelligent power discovery innovation” that acts as an “automated, energy aware network for data centres.” One of the greatest benefits of this solution is that it can help customers reduce their data centre power consumption by up to 95 per cent, therefore allowing them to stay in their data centres longer.
“Customers are building new data centres because they believe they’re out of power and cooling that can go into those data centres,” Donatelli said. “With our Data Center Smart Grid, we can help customers reclaim all of these efficiencies that were otherwise used up before (to) let them stay in their data centres longer.”
Removing unnecessary complexities
Mark Potter, senior vice-president and general manager for HP infrastructure software and blades, explained that since there’s often a lot of complexity and point products inside a data centre, IT sprawl exists.
By utilizing HP’s converged infrastructure solutions, customers can eliminate silos and complexity through things such as Virtual Connect. Virtual Connect helps to converge data and storage networks to enable organizations to eliminate IT sprawl. With HP’s FlexFabric technology, customers can wire their racks up one time to any network, therefore eliminating up to 95 per cent of sprawl at the network edge, Potter said.
To connect 16 servers to the network, Potter says the traditional approach requires more than 217 parts and cables. With HP Virtual Connect, instead of 217 parts, you only need two modules.
A message from Intel’s CIO
Intel’s vice-president and CIO, Diane Bryant, was one of the keynote speakers at the HP Tech Forum event. Bryant laid out some of the most common challenges that IT staff face inside organizations and also provided some helpful tips on how to make better use of resources.
Some of her advice to IT professionals include, have an understanding of the business, build and maintain partnerships to allow transformation in the business to happen and have a continuous IT plan.
Lessons in IT management from Intel’s vice-president and CIO
HP makes this company’s dream work
Without utilizing the technology and support from HP, movies such as Shrek, Madagascar and How to Train Your Dragon, from DreamWorks Animation Studio would not be possible, Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation, said.
“The images we’re creating (for our films) are among the most complex and richest that anyone in the graphics business is doing today,” Katzenberg said. “It takes an enormous amount of technology for us to put these images up on screen. Each movie requires 130,000 frames which contains hundreds of layers, and over 100TB of data. HP has been instrumental in helping to make DreamWorks’ dream work.”
