HP Touchpad

Sale starts tomorrow apparently, I will go get some 16GBs myself, 3? 4?  5? Not sure yet..

Even if you use it for nothing other than web browsing (or watching video) it’s a nice device. Pair it with a Touchstone (I love the Touchstone technology) and you got yourself a high resolution picture frame that can do far more for about the same cost as a 1024×768 standalone frame. I assume the accessories for the Touchpad will be dirt cheap as well.

Beats the hell out of a fire sale Android tablet I saw on Daily Steals recently.

Apparently some users in Europe received the Pre3 already, so they have manufactured  some, hopefully I can get my hands on a couple.

UPDATE - I visited about a dozen stores in the bay area none of them had any Touchpads in stock this morning. Best Buy is refusing to participate in the fire sale and I think supply is generally constrained. I suspect mostly what is happening is most stores probably have single digit numbers of Touchpads in stock, I’d be surprised if in many cases employees weren’t buying some of those right away, then all it takes is one or two customers to consume the remainder of the stock. More than one place I went to today had others like me racing around the area trying to find stock.

Thought it was kind of funny, one of the office supply stores – forgot which – had little advertisements with the reduced pricing (though for them it was $129 for the 16GB), and said good from now till the end of the year while supplies last – only the supplies didn’t even last through the first morning.

I read many similar stories on Pre Central in other parts of the country. Then I saw a link mentioning the HP SMB store had Touchpads available for order (the “Home” store lists them as out of stock).

So I tried to order — and was confronted with out of memory errors on the HP servers

again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and

I’ll save you the next 100 lines of that, and just say I was pretty persistant, working for more than two hours to try to get an order through. Not long after I started I found that Firefox and Seamonkey which I normally use in Linux was not rendering the billing address page on HP’s site, I suspect the page was somehow broken because HP’s servers are in a hissy fit at the moment. So I tried Opera – fortunately Opera was able to render the page. After trying again and again and again and.. I finally got an order confirmed for 4 x 16GB Touchpads for $99/ea.

I hope HP honors it, I suspect they will have enough to ship given the massive numbers of units they will be receiving from Best buy (apparently something like 250,000 units).

Woohoo.

Though earlier today I was really thinking to myself it really would of been nice if HP had given preferential treatment to those early adopters, give them the opportunity to buy more before the rest of the public. I suppose there wasn’t any time, and possibly wasn’t anyone around that cared enough to try to arrange something like that. I just hate the idea that small numbers of people may be able to buy large numbers of touchpads (I saw one report of a person buying 35 of them at once), and trying to profit off of it on eBay (reminds me of a lady that mortgaged her home and tried to buy every iPhone at a store one day only to be told she was only allowed to buy one). For me I will use one of the four for work use only, at least two more will likely be gifts for family I think they will like them a lot, and the 4th I haven’t figured out yet, probably a spare unit or something, since HP apparently is not going to honor warranties on these units (though I believe they are honoring them on the ones sold at full price).

Since I was in such a rush to order – I’m contemplating trying to go through the process again to get a 32GB touchpad – so I can return it to best buy for $599 (what I paid for my current TP). I thought about just returning my current one but migrating the data and stuff would be a pain – and I know my current TP works great – there’s always a chance that a replacement might have a glitch.

Best buy extended the return period for Touchpad to 60 days, which gives me about 11 days if I wanted to return mine.

UPDATE 2 Just checked and HP charged my CC .. so I should be good to go

UPDATE 3 Best buy changed their policy again and is allowing customers to buy 1 per customer while supplies last, reports seem to be stores selling out within minutes or stores haven’t gotten the word yet, Best buy removed the SKUs from their systems and are having to put them back in again. See more info here. Looks like they’ll refund the difference in price for my launch day 32GB TP, just need to find that receipt…

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Here are the specs for the Palm Pixi Plus.

Offer is good for today only. I have not heard of The daily steals web site until today so I can’t vouch for them(yet). As usual I used a temporary credit card to make the purchase.

I retired my Palm Pre 1 while I wait for a Pre 3, and I must say since I’ve had the Pre in airport mode the battery lasts forever, wow. I was really truely shocked. It could go all day and maybe drop 2-3% at the most. Battery life was at the lowest level when I had my Pre integrated with Exchange I’d have to charge it a couple times a day. Thankfully the touchstone made that easy.

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Maybe I’ll go back to a ‘feature phone’ and get a WebOS tablet, combined with my 3G/4G Mifi and use that as my web-connected portable device or something. My previous Sanyo phones worked really well. Not sure where I’m at with my Sprint contract for my phone, and Sprint no longer carries the Pre and doesn’t look like it will carry the Pre 2. I tried the Pixi when it first came out but the keyboard keys were too small for my fingers even when using the tips of my fingers.

I found a virtual keyboard app which lets me hobble along on my Pre in the meantime while I figure out what to do.

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Well that’s more like it, HP offered $1.6 Billion to acquire 3PAR this morning topping Dell’s offer by 33%. Perhaps the 3cV solution can finally be fully backed by HP. More info from The Register here. And more info on what this could mean to HP and 3PAR products from the same source here.

3PAR’s website is having serious issues, this obviously has spawned a ton of interest in the company, I get intermittent blank pages and connection refused messages.

I didn’t wake my rep up for this one.

The 3cV solution was announced about three years ago -

Elements of the 3cV solution include:

• 3PAR InServ^® Storage Servers—highly virtualized, tiered-storage arrays built for utility computing. Organizations creating virtualized IT infrastructures for workload consolidation use InServ arrays to reduce the cost of allocated storage capacity, storage administration, and SAN infrastructure.
• HP BladeSystem c-Class Server Blades—the leading blade server infrastructure on the market for datacenters of all sizes. HP BladeSystem c-Class server blades minimize energy and space requirements and increase administrative productivity through advantages in I/O virtualization, powering and cooling, and manageability.
• VMware vSphere—the leading virtualization platform for industry-standard servers. VMware vSphere helps customers reduce capital and operating expenses, improve agility, ensure business continuity, strengthen security, and go green.

While I could not find the image that depicts the 3cV solution(not sure how long it’s been gone for), here is more info on it for posterity.

The Advantages of 3cV
3cV offers combined benefits that enable customers to manage and scale their server and storage environments simply, allowing them to halve server, storage and operational costs while lowering the environmental impact of the datacenter.

• Reduces storage and server costs by 50%—The inherently modular architectures of the HP BladeSystem c-Class and the 3PAR InServ Storage Server—coupled with the increased utilization provided by VMware Infrastructure and 3PAR Thin Provisioning—allow 3cV customers to do more with less capital expenditure. As a result, customers are able to reduce overall storage and server costs by 50% or more. High levels of availability and disaster recovery can also be affordably extended to more applications through VMware Infrastructure and 3PAR thin copy technologies.
• Cuts operational costs by 50% and increases business agility—With 3cV, customers are able to provision and change server and storage resources on demand. By using VMware Infrastructure’s capabilities for rapid server provisioning and the dynamic optimization provided by VMware VMotion and Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), HP Virtual Connect and Insight Control management software, and 3PAR Rapid Provisioning and Dynamic Optimization, customers are able to provision and re-provision physical servers, virtual hosts, and virtual arrays with tailored storage services in a matter of minutes, not days. These same technologies also improve operational simplicity, allowing overall server and storage administrative efficiency to increase by 3x or more.
• Lowers environmental impact—With 3cV, customers are able to cut floor space and power requirements dramatically. Server floor space is minimized through server consolidation enabled by VMware Infrastructure (up to 70% savings) and HP BladeSystem density (up to 50% savings). Additional server power requirements are cut by 30% or more through the unique virtual power management capabilities of HP Thermal Logic technology. Storage floor space is reduced by the 3PAR InServ Storage Server, which delivers twice the capacity per floor tile as compared to alternatives. In addition, 3PAR thin technologies, Fast RAID 5, and wide striping allow customers to power and cool as much as 75% less disk capacity for a given project without sacrificing performance.
• Delivers security through virtualization, not dedicated hardware silos—Whereas traditional datacenter architectures force tradeoffs between high resource utilization and the need for secure segregation of application resources for disparate user groups, 3cV resolves these competing needs through advanced virtualization. For instance, just as VMware Infrastructure securely isolates virtual machines on shared severs, 3PAR Virtual Domains provides secure “virtual arrays” for private, autonomous storage provisioning from a single, massively-parallel InServ Storage Server.

Though due to the recent stack wars it’s been hard for 3PAR to partner with HP to promote this solution since I’m sure HP would rather push their own full stack. Well hopefully now they can. The best of both worlds technology wise can come together.

More details from 3PAR’s VMware products site.

From HP’s offer letter -

We propose to increase our offer to acquire all of 3PAR outstanding common stock to $24.00 per share in cash. This offer represents a 33.3% premium to Dell’s offer price and is a “Superior Proposal” as defined in your merger agreement with Dell. HP’s proposal is not subject to any financing contingency. HP’s Board of Directors has approved this proposal, which is not subject to any additional internal approvals. If approved by your Board of Directors, we expect the transaction would close by the end of the calendar year.

In addition to the compelling value offered by our proposal, there are unparalleled strategic benefits to be gained by combining these two organizations. HP is uniquely positioned to capitalize on 3PAR’s next-generation storage technology by utilizing our global reach and superior routes to market to deliver 3PAR’s products to customers around the world. Together, we will accelerate our ability to offer unmatched levels of performance, efficiency and scalability to customers deploying cloud or scale-out environments, helping drive new growth for both companies.
As a Silicon Valley-based company, we share 3PAR’s passion for innovation.
[..]

We understand that you will first need to communicate this proposal and your Board’s determinations to Dell, but we are prepared to execute the merger agreement immediately following your termination of the Dell merger agreement.

Music to my ears.

[tangent -- begin]

My father worked for HP in the early days back when they were even more innovative than they are today, he recalled their first $50M revenue year. He retired from HP in the early 90s after something like 25-30 years.

I attended my freshman year at Palo Alto Senior High school, and one of my classmates/friends (actually I don’t think I shared any classes with him now that I think about it) was Ben Hewlett, grandson of one of the founders of HP. Along with a couple other friends Ryan and Jon played a bunch of RPGs (I think the main one was Twilight 2000, something one of my other friends Brian introduced me to in 8th grade).

I remember asking Ben one day why he took Japanese as his second language course when it was significantly more difficult than Spanish(which was the easy route, probably still is?) I don’t think I’ll ever forget his answer. He said “because my father says it’s the business language of the future..”

How times have changed.. Now it seems everyone is busy teaching their children Chinese. I’m happy knowing English, and a touch of bash and perl.

I never managed to keep in touch with my friends from Palo Alto, after one short year there I moved back to Thailand for two more years of high school there.

[tangent -- end]

HP could do some cool stuff with 3PAR, they have much better technology overall, I have no doubt HP has their eyes on their HDS partnership and the possibility of replacing their XP line with 3PAR technology in the future has got to be pretty enticing. HDS hasn’t done a whole lot recently, and I read not long ago that regardless what HP says, they don’t have much (if any) input into the HDS product line.

The HP USP-V OEM relationship is with Hitachi SSG. The Sun USP-V reseller deal was struck with HDS. Mikkelsen said: “HP became a USP-V OEM in 2004 when the USP-V was already done. HP had no input to the design and, despite what they say, very little input since.” HP has been a Hitachi OEM since 1999.

Another interesting tidbit of information from the same article:

It [HDS] cannot explain why it created the USP-V – because it didn’t, Hitachi SSG did, in Japan, and its deepest thinking and reasons for doing so are literally lost in translation.

The loss of HP as an OEM customer of HDS, so soon after losing Sun as an OEM customer would be a really serious blow to HDS(one person I know claimed it accounts for ~50% of their business), whom seems to have a difficult time selling stuff in western countries, I’ve read it’s mostly because of their culture. Similarly it seems Fujitsu has issues selling stuff in the U.S. at least, they seem to have some good storage products but not much attention is paid to them outside of Asia(and maybe Europe). Will HDS end up like Fujtisu as a result of HP buying 3PAR? Not right away for sure, but longer term they stand to lose a ton of market share in my opinion.

And with the USP getting a little stale (rumor has it they are near to announcing a technology refresh for it), it would be good timing for HP to get 3PAR, to cash in on the upgrade cycle by getting customers to go with the T class arrays instead of the updated USP whenever possible.

I read on an HP blog earlier in the year an interesting comment -

The 3PAR is drastically less expensive than an XP, but is an active/active concurrent design, can scale up to 8 clustered controllers, highly virtualized, customers can self-install, self-maintain, and requires no professional services. Its on par with the XP in terms of raw performance, but has the ease of use of the EVA. Like the XP, the 3PAR can be carved up into virtual domains so that service providers or multi-tenant arrays can have delegated administration.

I still think 3PAR is worth more, and should stay independent, but given the current situation would much rather have them in the arms of HP than Dell.

Obviously those analysts that said Dell paid too much for 3PAR were wrong, and didn’t understand the value of the 3PAR technology. HP does otherwise they wouldn’t be offering 33% more cash.

After the collapse of so many of 3PAR’s NAS partners over the past couple of years, the possibility of having Ibrix available again for a longer term solution is pretty good. Dell bought Exanet’s IP earlier in the year. LSI owns Onstor, HP bought Polyserve and Ibrix. Really just about no “open” NAS players left. Isilon seems to be among the biggest NAS players left but of course their technology is tightly integrated into their disk drive systems, same with Panasas.

Maybe that recent legal investigation into the board at 3PAR had some merit after all.

Dell should take their $billion and shove it in Pillar’s(or was it Compellent ? I forgot) face, so the CEO there can make his dream of being a billion dollar storage company come true, if only for a short time.

I’m not a stock holder or anything, I don’t buy stocks(or bonds).

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So a couple days ago a friend of mine offered to get me in for free so I took him up on his offer. Get away from the office, and the conference is about one mile from my apartment.

The keynote was somewhat interesting, given by a Distinguished Engineer from Microsoft. I suppose more than anything I thought some things he had to say were interesting to note. I’ll skip the obvious stuff, he had a couple of less obvious things to say -

Let OEMs innovate

One thing he says MS does is they have a dedicated team of people that instrument subsets of their applications and servers and gather performance data(if you know me you probably know I collect a lot of stats myself everything from apps, to OS, to network, load balancers, power strips, storage etc).

They take this data and build usage profiles for their applications and come up with as generic as possible yet still being specific on certain areas for their server designs:

• X amount of CPU capacity
• X amount of memory
• X amount of disk
• X amount of I/O
• Power envelope at a per-rack and per-container basis
• Operational temperature and humidity levels the systems will operate in

He raised the point if you get too specific you tie the hands of the OEMs and they can’t get creative. He mentioned that on a few occasions they sent out RFPs and gotten back very different designs from different OEMs. He says they use 3 different manufacturers (two I know are SGI/Rackable and Dell, don’t know the third). They apparently aren’t big enough to deal with more OEMs (a strange statement I thought) so they only work with a few.

Now I think for most organizations this really isn’t possible, as getting this sort of precise information isn’t easy, especially from the application level.

They seem to aim for operating the servers in up to mid 90 degree temperatures. Which is pretty extreme but these days not too uncommon among the hyper scale companies. I saw a resume of a MS operations guy recently that claimed he used monitoring software to watch over 800,000 servers.

They emphasized purpose built servers, eliminating components that are not needed to reduce costs and power usage, use low power processors regardless of application. Emphasis on performance/watt/TCO$ I think is what he said.

Stranded Power

Also emphasized eliminating stranded power, use every watt that is available to you, stranded power is very expensive. To achieve this they leverage power capping in the servers to get more servers per rack because they know what their usage profile is they cap their servers at a certain level. I know HP has this technology I assume others do too though I haven’t looked. One thing that was confusing to me when quizzing the HP folks on it was that it was server or chassis(in the case of blades) level. To me that doesn’t seem very efficient, I would expect it to at least be rack/circuit level. I mean if the intelligence is already in the servers you should be able to aggregate that intelligence outside the individual servers to operate more as a collective, to gain even more efficiencies. You could potentially extend the concept to the container level as well.

Idle servers still draw significant power

In my own experience measuring power levels at the PDU/CDU level over the past 6 years I have seen that typical power usage fluctuates at most 10-15% from idle to peak(application peak not really server peak). This guy from MS says that even with the most advanced “idle” states the latest generation CPUs offer it only reduces overall power usage to about 50% of peak. So there still seems to be significant room for improving power efficiencies when a system is idle. Perhaps that is why Google is funding some project to this end.

MS’s Generation 4 data centers

I’m sure others have read about them, but you know me, I really don’t pay much attention to what MS does, really have not in a decade or more so this was news to me..

He covered their evolution of data center design, topping out at what he called Gen3 data centers in Chicago and Ireland, container based.

Their generation 4 data centers are also container based but appear to be significantly more advanced from an infrastructure perspective than current data center containers. If you have silverlight you can watch a video on it here, it’s the same video shown at the conference.

I won’t go into big details I’m sure you can find them online but the basics is it is designed to be able to operate in seemingly almost any environment, using just basic outside air for cooling. If it gets too hot then a water system kicks in to cool the incoming air(an example was lowering ~105 degree air outside to ~95 degree air inside cool enough for the servers). If it gets too cold then an air re-circulation system kicks in and circulates a portion of the exhaust from the servers back to the front of the servers to mix with incoming cold air. If it gets too humid it does something else to compensate(forgot what).

They haven’t deployed it at any scale yet so don’t have hard data on things yet but have enough research to move forward with the project.

I’ll tell you what I’m glad I don’t deal with server hardware anymore, these new data centers are running so hot I’d want them to run the cooling just for me, I can’t work in those temperatures I’d die.

Server level UPS

You may of heard people like Google talking about using batteries in their servers. I never understood this concept myself, I can probably understand not using big centralized UPSs in your data center, but I would expect the logical move would be to rack level UPSs. Ones that would take AC input and output DC power to the servers directly.

One of the main complaints about normal UPSs as far as efficiency goes is the double conversion that goes on, incoming AC converts to DC to the batteries, then back to AC to go to the racks. I think this is mainly because DC power isn’t very good for long distances. But there are already some designs on the market from companies like SGI (aka Rackable) for rack level power distribution(e.g. no power supplies in the servers). This is the Cloudrack product, something I’ve come to really like a lot since I first got wind of it in 2008.

If you have such a system, and I imagine Google does something similar, I don’t understand why they’d put batteries in the server instead of integrate them into the rack power distribution, but whatever it’s their choice.

I attended a breakout session which talked about this topic presented by someone from the Electric Power Research Institute. The speaker got pretty technical into the electrical terminology beyond what I could understand but I got some of the basic concepts.

The most interesting claim he made was that 90% of electrical disruptions last less than two seconds. This here was enough for me to understand why people are looking to server-level batteries instead of big centralized systems.

They did pretty extensive testing with system components and power disruptions and had some interesting results, honestly can’t really recite them they were pretty technical, involved measuring power disruptions in the number of cycles(each cycle is 1/60th of a second), comparing the duration of the disruption with the magnitude of it(in their case voltage sags). So they measured the “breaking” point of equipment, what sort of disruptions can they sustain, he said for the most part power supplies are rated to handle 4 cycles of disruption, or 4/60ths of a second likely without noticeable impact. Beyond that in most cases equipment won’t get damaged but it will shut off/reboot.

He also brought up that in their surveys it was very rare that power sags went below 60% of total voltage. Which made me think about some older lower quality UPSs I used to have in combination with auto switching power supplies. What would happen when the UPS went to battery it caused a voltage spike, which convinced the auto switching power supplies to switch from 120V to 208V and that immediately tripped their breaker/saftey mechanism because the voltage returned to 120V within who knows how many cycles. I remember when I was ordering special high grade power supplies I had to request that they be hard set to 110V to avoid this. Eventually I replaced the UPSs with better ones and haven’t had the problem since.

But it got me thinking could the same thing happen? I mean pretty much all servers now have auto switching power supplies, and one of this organizations tests involved 208V/220V power sags dropping as low as 60% of regular voltage. Could that convince the power supply it’s time to go to 120V ? I didn’t get to ask..

They constructed a power supply board with some special capacitors I believe they were(they were certainly not batteries but they may of had another technical term that escapes me), which can store enough energy to ride that 2 second window where 90% of power problems occur in. He talked about other components that would assist in the charging of this capacitor, since it was an order of magnitude larger than the regular ones in the system there had to be special safeguards in place to prevent it from exploding or something when it charged up. Again lots of electrical stuff beyond my areas of expertise(and interest really!).

They demonstrated it the lab, and it worked well. He said there really isn’t anything like it on the market, and this is purely a lab thing they don’t plan to make anything to sell. The power supply manufacturers are able to do this, but they are waiting to see if a market develops, if there will be demand in the general computing space to make such technology available.

I’d be willing to bet for the most part people will not use server level batteries. In my opinion it doesn’t make sense unless your operating at really high levels of scale, I believe for the most part people want and need more of a buffer, more of a margin of error to be able to correct things that might fail, having only a few seconds to respond really isn’t enough time. At certain scale it becomes less important but most places aren’t at that scale. I’d guesstimate that scale doesn’t kick in until you have high hundreds or thousands of systems, preferably at diverse facilities. And most of those systems have to be in like configurations running similar/same applications in a highly redundant configuration. Until you get there I think it will still be very popular to stick with redundant power feeds and redundant UPSs. The costs to recover from such a power outage are greater than what you gain in efficiency(in my opinion).

In case it’s not obvious I feel the same way about flywheel UPSs

Airflow Optimization

Another breakout session was about airflow optimization. The one interesting thing I learned here is that you can measure how efficient your airflow is by comparing the temperature of the intake of the AC units vs the output of them. If the difference is small (sub 10 degrees) then there is too much air mixture going on. If you have a 100% efficient cooling system it will be 28-30 degrees difference. He also mentioned that there isn’t much point in completely isolating thermal zones from each other unless your running high densities(at least 8kW per rack). If your doing less the time for ROI is too long for it to be effective.

He mentioned one customer that they worked with, they spent $45k on sensors(350 of them I think), and a bunch of other stuff to optimize the airflow for their 5,000 square foot facility. While they could of saved more by keeping up to 5 of their CRAH(?) units turned off(AC units), the customer in the end wanted to keep them all on they were not comfortable operating with temps in the mid 70s. But despite having the ACs on, with the airflow optimization they were able to save ~5.7% in power which resulted in something like $33k in annual savings. And now they have a good process and equipment to be able to repeat this procedure on their own if they want in other locations.

Other stuff

There was a couple other breakout sessions I went to, one from some sort of Wall Street research firm, which really didn’t seem interesting, he mostly talked about what his investors are interested in(stupid things like the number of users on Twitter and Facebook – if you know me you know I really hate these social sites)

Then I can’t leave this blog without mentioning the most pointless breakout session ever, sorry no offense to the person who put it on, it was about Developing Cloud Services. I really wasn’t expecting much but what I got was nothing. He spent something like 30 minutes talking about how you need infrastructure, power, network, support etc. I talked with another attendee who agreed this guy had no idea what he was talking about he was just rambling on about infrastructure(he works for a data center company). I can understand talking about that stuff but everything he covered was so incredibly obvious it was a pointless waste of time.

Shameless Plug

If your building out a datacenter with traditional rack mount systems and can choose what PDU you use I suggest you check out Servertech stuff, I really like them for their flexibility but they also on their higher end models offer integrated environmental sensors, if you have 2 PDUs per rack as an example you can have up to 4 sensors(two in front, two in back yes you want sensors in back). I really love the insight that massive instrumentation gives. And it’s nice to have this feature built into the PDU so you don’t need extra equipment.

Servertech also has software that integrates with server operating systems which can pro-actively gracefully shut down systems(in any order you want) as the temperature rises in the event of a cooling failure, they call it Smart Load Shedding.

I think they may also be unique in the industry in having a solution that can measure power usage on a per-outlet basis. And they claim something like accuracy within 1% or something. I recall asking another PDU manufacturer a few years ago on the prospects of measuring power on a per-outlet basis and they said it was too expensive, it would add ~$50 per outlet monitored. I don’t know what Servertech charges for these new CDUs (as they call them), but I’m sure they don’t charge $50/outlet more.

There may be other solutions in the industry that are similar, I haven’t found a reason to move away from Servertech yet. My previous PDU vendor had some pretty severe quality issues(~30% failure rate), so of course not all solutions are equal.

Conclusion

The conclusion to this is it pretty much lived up to my expectations. I would not pay for this event to attend it unless I was building/designing data centers. The sales guys from Datacenter Dynamics tried to convince me that it would be of value to me, and on their site they list a wide range of professions that can benefit from it. Maybe it’s true, I learned a few things, but really nothing that will cause me to adjust strategy in the near future.

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Join us for a complimentary technical seminar and learn how the Dell EqualLogic PS Series storage solution and Microsoft Exchange, deployed on Dell PowerEdge servers can deliver[..]

Myself I don’t expect to learn anything, and  3PAR storage can run exchange for a large number of users(from these numbers you could extrapolate a max of 192,000 mailboxes on a single storage system each with a heavy I/O profile), so not really in the market for some Equallogic storage. BUT I like to get away, especially if it’s local. I do find it curious that the event is specifically about Exchange, that is the mindset of dedicated storage to a particular application. When the industry trend seems to be leaning towards storage that is shared amongst many applications. Given that Microsoft doesn’t appear to be an event sponsor, I find this idea curious.

Thought this was interesting as well, Microsoft recommends RAID 1 for Exchange but (from one of the links above)..

Internal tests performed by 3PAR show that using RAID 5 (7+1)—i.e., seven data blocks per parity block—demonstrated that the same simulated Exchange workload used for Exchange 2007 ESRP testing had disk latencies that were higher than RAID 1 but well within Microsoft’s recommendations[..]

Going from RAID 1+0 to RAID 5+0 (7+1) is a pretty dramatic shift, showing how fast their “Fast” RAID is, and of course if you find out you laid data out incorrectly you can fix it on the fly. I wonder what Dell will say about their stuff.

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If your interested you can register here. If it was earlier in the day I’d probably go..

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