Posts Tagged ‘hp’

HP Now Supporting Ubuntu on Its Servers

HP has announced that it will be partnering with Canonical, the commercial backers of Ubuntu, to provide certification and support for Ubuntu on its servers. HP already offers Red Hat and SUSE Enterprise Linux on their servers, but will now be offering support for Ubuntu as well. Ubuntu has been very popular on the desktop but is also making a charge in the datacenter as well. The LTS releases of Ubuntu offer customers a long-term supported Linux operating system without the costs of Red Hat or SUSE. Of course, customers can purchase support from Canonical if they so choose, but they are free to use Ubuntu for, well, free. It has been gaining popularity both in small companies and in large companies with the likes of Wikipedia running Ubuntu exclusively. HP will be offering the OS on its ProLiant product lines which includes the cheap pedestal servers to blade center systems.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Feb 17th, 2009

HP Acquires LeftHand Networks

Hewlett-Packard announced today the purchase of SAN maker LeftHand Networks for $360 million. LeftHand was founded in 1999 and has become a leader in iSCSI SAN solutions. HP plans on adding the LeftHand product into its product line in between the lower-end MSA and the higher-end EVA models. The company boasted 11,000 installations across 3,000 customers worldwide.

LeftHand’s solution is slightly different than HP’s, though will complement HP’s offerings nicely. Their SANs offer themselves up to the network only as iSCSI targets and don’t offer the SAN/NAS compatibility like other competing devices, but they do offer a lower entry point into the SAN arena. Rather than purchasing the head node and adding shelves when additional storage is needed, LeftHand built its SANs upon traditional x86 servers and used filesystem clustering to provide redundancy, performance, and capacity. The benefit to this model is somewhat of a pay-as-you-go model since a company doesn’t have to make a large up-front investment and then smaller investments later. Instead, you can invest less up front and expand the ‘cluster’ as you go.

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Filed under News : Comments (1) : Oct 1st, 2008

The Evolution of the Notebook

HP announced its new EliteBook 6930p notebook a few days ago, bragging up to 24 hours of battery life. To attain this long battery life it needs to have an extra high-capacity battery. If it’s anything like the Gateway or Dell machines with extra-capcity batteries that extend out of the normal case of the machine, then I won’t have anything to do with it, but that’s not what’s interesting here. It appears we are on the brink of the notebook becoming a commodity like cell phones are today. We have been seeing the rise of the use of ‘netbooks’, a smaller, cheaper form of laptops. With the new ‘all-day’ laptops, the small form-factor of the netbook, and wireless signal using WiMaxx or 3G, the computer is well on its way to becoming the new cell phone. In fact, Cnet has mentioned possible deals in the works between Dell and a wireless provider to offer a wireless plan that includes one of the Dell Inspiron Mini9′s. It’ll be interesting for sure what happens in the laptop market, but battery life was one of the missing links in our search for a true mobile computing experience.

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Filed under News, Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Sep 13th, 2008