Storage Nation

This post is the second of a series of video posts from the HP Blades Day in February 2010.  Previous posts: HP Blades Day – Lab Session – Part I In this video, James Singer talks about power supplies.  This may not seem like the most interesting subject in the world, however as you will see, HP have thought in detail about the important features of PSU design.  The interesting ones for me are: Efficiency – the latest power supplies run at 90% or more efficiency at just 8% load, so there’s very little wastage in terms of power when the chassis is experiencing variable load.  In addition, using a feature called DPS (Dynamic Power Saver), PSUs are powered up and down on-demand in order to keep efficiency in that optimal 25-40% range.

Not being a blades person “per-se”, I was looking forward to the lab session at HP Blades Day where we’d get to understand the physical hardware in more detail.  The video here shows James Singer taking us through the hardware and explaining the basic concepts of how the it is constructed.  What shows through this video is the passion these guys have.  You can tell they live and breathe blade technology.  I really enjoyed this session as I saw it as the starting of my personal vision on where HP are headed in their converged architecture.  Enjoy.  More to come (oh and apologies for James going out of shot – I wasn’t paying attention . Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s my roundup of all the posts, pictures, video and comments from the HP Blades Tech Day Tweets The official hashtag for the event was #hpbladesday with hundreds of tweets being generated from the start of the Tech Day until now. Bloggers’ Posts By name order, here are the relevant posts from each blogger

Day 2 of HP Blades Day took place in a new location – the Customer Experience Centre.  This was due to issues with Wifi on day 1, now resolved in our new location.  Order of the day was: Review of the previous day’s presentations with a quick question & answer session Presentation on Client Virtualisation Factory tour Client Virtualisation Joseph George presented to the bloggers on client (aka desktop) virtualisation.  Whilst HP seem to have a story in this area, I’m skeptical about the whole process of virtualising desktops at this stage, other than in certain use cases.  I can see benefits for the following: High availability environments such as financial traders, where loss of a desktop translates to financial loss. Large scale desktop deployments where functionality is generic.  A good example of this is call centres; desks only require access to limited features (so don’t need high powered devices) and physical desktops may be used by multiple users. Environments not suitable for desktop virtualisation will include mobile users and anyone running bespoke hardware or software with hardware dependencies