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October 19, 2011

HP Storage strategy – some hits, some misses

Filed under: Random Thought,Storage — Tags: , — Nate @ 9:24 pm

[UPDATED – Some minor updates since my original post] I was at an Executive Briefing by HP, given by HP’s head of storage, and former 3PAR CEO David Scott. I suppose this is one good reason to be in the Bay Area – events like this didn’t really happen in Seattle.

I really didn’t know what to expect, I was looking forward to seeing David speak as I had not heard him before, his accent, oddly enough surprised me.

He covered a lot of various topics, it was clear of course he was more passionate about 3PAR than Lefthand, or Ibrix or XP or EVA, not surprising.

The meeting was not technical enough to get any of my previously mentioned questions answered, seemed very geared towards the PhB crowd.

HP Storage hits

3PAR

One word: Duh. The crown jewel of the HP storage strategy.

He emphasized over and over the 3PAR architecture and how it’s the platform powering 7 of the top 10 clouds out there, the design that lets them handle unpredictable workloads, you know this stuff by now, I don’t need to repeat it.

David pointed out an interesting tidbit with regards to their latest SPC-1 announcement, he compared the I/O performance and cost per usable TB of the V800 to a Texas Memory Systems all-flash array that was tested earlier this year.

The V800 outperformed the TMS system by 50,000 IOPS, and came in at a cost per usable TB of only about $13,000 vs $50,000/TB for the TMS box.

Cost per I/O, which he did not mention certainly favored the TMS system($1.05), but the comparison was still a good one I thought – we can give you the performance of flash and still give you a metric ton of disk space at the same time. Well if you want to get technical I guesstimate the fully loaded V800 weighs in at 13,160 pounds or about 6 metric tons.

Of course flash certainly has it’s use cases, if you don’t have a lot of data it doesn’t make sense to invest in 2,000 spinning rust buckets to get to 450,000 IOPS.

Peer Motion

Peer motion – both a hit and a miss, a hit because it’s a really neat technology, the ability to non disruptively migrate between storage systems without 3rd party appliances, the miss, well I’ll talk about that below.

He compared peer motion to the likes of Hitachi‘s USP/VSP, IBM‘s SVC, and EMC‘s VPLEX, which are all expensive, complicated bolt-on solutions. Seemed reasonable.

Lefthand VSA

It’s a good concept, and it’s nice to see it as a supported platform. David mentioned that Vmware themselves originally tried to acquire Lefthand (or wanted to acquire I don’t know if anything official was made) because they saw the value in the technology – and of course recently Vmware introduced something kinda-sorta-similar to the Lefthand VSA in vSphere 5. Though it seems not quite as flexible or as scalable.

I’m not sure I see much value in the P4000 appliances by contrast, I hear that doing RAID 5 or worse yet RAID 6 on P4000 is just asking for a whole lotta pain.

StoreOnce De-duplication

It sounds like it has a lot of promise, I’ll put it in the hit column for now as it’s still a young technology and it’ll take time to see where it goes. But the basic concept is a single de-duplication technology for all of your data. He contrasted this with EMC’s strategy for example where they have client side de-dupe with their software backup products, in line de-dupe with data domain, and primary storage dedupe — none of which are compatible with each other. Who knows, by the time HP gets it right with StoreOnce maybe EMC and others will get it right too.

I’m still not sold myself on the advantages of dedupe outside of things like backups, and things like VDI. I’ve sat through what seems like a dozen NetApp presentations on the topic so I have had the marketing shoved down my neck many times. I came to this realization a few years ago during an eval test of some data domain gear, I’ll be honest and admit I did not fully comprehend the technicals behind de-duplication at the time and I expected pretty good results from feeding it tens of gigabytes of uncompressed text data. But turns out I was wrong and realized why I was under an incorrect assumption to begin with.

Now data compression on the other hand is another animal entirely, being able to support in line data compression without suffering much or any I/O hit really would be nice to see (I am aware there are one/more vendors out there that offer this technology now).

HP Storage Misses

Nobody is perfect, HP and 3PAR are no exception no matter how much I may sing praises for them here.

Peer Motion

When I first heard about this technology being available on both the P4000 and 3PAR platforms I assumed that it was compatible with each other, meaning you could peer motion data to/from P4000 and 3PAR. One of my friends at 3PAR clarified this was not the case with me a few weeks ago and David Scott mentioned that again today.

He tried to justify it comparing it to vSphere vMotion where you can’t do a vMotion between a vSphere system and a Hyper-V system. He could of gone deeper and said you can’t do vMotion even between vSphere hosts if the CPUs are not compatible, would of been a better example.

So he said that most federation technologies are usually homogeneous in nature, and you should not expect to be able to peer motion from a HP P4000 to a HP 3PAR system.

Where HP’s argument kind of falls apart here is that the bolt on solutions he referred to as inferior previously do have the ability to migrate data between systems that are not the same. It may be ugly, it may be kludgey, but it can work. Hitachi even lists 3PAR F400, S400 and T800 as supported platforms behind the USP. IBM lists 3PAR and HP storage behind their SVC.

So, what I want from HP is the ability to do peer motion between at least all of their higher end storage platforms (I can understand if they never have peer motion on the P2000/MSA since it’s just a low end box). I’m not willing to accept any excuses, other than “sorry, we can’t do it because it’s too complicated”. Don’t tell me I shouldn’t expect to have it, I fully expect to have it.

Just another random thought but when I think of storage federation, and homogeneous I can’t help but think of this scene from Star trek VI

GORKON: I offer a toast. …The undiscovered country, …the future.
ALL: The undiscovered country.
SPOCK: Hamlet, act three, scene one.
GORKON: You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.
CHANG: (in Klingonese) ‘To be or not to be.’
KERLA: Captain Kirk, I thought Romulan ale was illegal.
KIRK: One of the advantages of being a thousand light years from Federation headquarters.
McCOY: To you, Chancellor Gorkon, one of the architects of our future.
ALL: Chancellor!
SCOTT: Perhaps we are looking at something of that future here.
CHANG: Tell me, Captain Kirk, would you be willing to give up Starfleet?
SPOCK: I believe the Captain feels that Starfleet’s mission has always been one of peace.
CHANG: Ah.
KIRK: Far be it for me to dispute my first officer. Starfleet has always been…
CHANG: Come now, Captain, there’s no need to mince words. In space, all warriors are cold warriors.
UHURA: Er. General, are you fond of …Shakes ….peare?
CHEKOV: We do believe all planets have a sovereign claim to inalienable human rights.
AZETBUR: Inalien… If only you could hear yourselves? ‘Human rights.’ Why the very name is racist. The Federation is no more than a ‘homo sapiens’ only club.
CHANG: Present company excepted, of course.
KERLA: In any case, we know where this is leading. The annihilation of our culture.
McCOY: That’s not true!
KERLA: No!
McCOY: No!
CHANG: ‘To be, or not to be!’, that is the question which preoccupies our people, Captain Kirk. …We need breathing room.
KIRK: Earth, Hitler, nineteen thirty-eight.
CHANG: I beg your pardon?
GORKON: Well, …I see we have a long way to go.

For the most basic workloads it’s not such a big deal if you have vSphere and storage vMotion (or some other similar technology). You cannot fully compare storage vMotion with peer motion but for offering the basic ability to move data live between different storage platforms it does (mostly) work.

HP Scale-out NAS (X9000)

I want this to be successful, I really do. Because I like to use 3PAR disks and well there just aren’t many NAS options out there these days that are compatible. I’m not a big fan of NetApp, I very reluctantly bought a V3160 cluster to try to replace an Exanet cluster on my last 3PAR box because well Exanet kicked the bucket(not the product we had installed but the company itself). I left the company not long after that, and barely a year later the company is already going to abandon NetApp and go with the X9000 (of all things!).  Meanwhile their unsupported Exanet cluster keeps chugging along.

Back to X9000. It sounds like a halfway decent product they say the main thing they lacked was snapshot support and that is there now(or will be soon), kind of strange Ibrix has been around for how long and they did not have file system snapshots till now? I really have not heard much about Ibrix from anyone other than HP whom obviously sings the praises for the product.

I am still somewhat bitter for 3PAR not buying Exanet when they had the chance, Exanet is a far better technology than Ibrix. Exanet was sold for, if I remember right $12 million, a drop in the bucket. Exanet had deals on the table(at the time) that would of brought in more than $12 million in revenue (in each deal) alone. Multi petabyte deals. Here is the Exanet Architecture (and file system), as it stood in 2005, in my opinion, very similar to the 3PAR approach(completely distributed, clustered design – Exanet treats files like 3PAR treats chunklets), except Exanet did not have any special ASICs, everything was done in software. Exanet had more work to do on their product it was far from perfect but it had a pretty solid base to build upon.

So, given that I do hope X9000 does well, I mean my needs are not that great,. what I’d really like to see is a low end VSA for the X9000 along the lines of their P4000 iSCSI VSA. Just for simple file storage in an HA fashion. I don’t need to push 30 gigabits/second, just want something that is HA, has decent performance and is easy to manage.

Legacy storage systems (EVA especially)

Let it die already, HP has been adamant they will continue to support and develop the EVA platform for their legacy customers. That sort of boggles my mind. Why waste money on that dead end platform. Use the money to give discounted incentives to upgrade to 3PAR when the time comes. I can understand supporting existing installs, bug fix upgrades, but don’t waste money on bringing out whole new revisions of hardware and software to this dead end product. David said so himself – supporting the install base of EVA and XP is supporting their 11% market share, the other 89% of the market that they don’t have they are going to push 3PAR/Lefthand/Ibrix.

I would find a way to craft a message to that 11% install base, subliminal messaging (ala Max Headroom, not sure why that came to my head) make them want to upgrade to a 3PAR box, not the next EVA system.

XP/P9500 I can kinda sorta see keeping around, I mean there are some things it is good at that even 3PAR can’t do today. But the market for such things is really tiny, and shrinking all the time. Maybe HP doesn’t put much effort into this platform because it is OEM’d from Hitachi, in which case it doesn’t cost a lot to re-sell, in which case it doesn’t make a big difference if they keep selling it or stopped selling it.  I don’t know.

I can just see what goes through a typical 3PAR SE’s mind (at least those that were present before HP acquired 3PAR) when they are faced with selling an EVA. If the deal closes perhaps they scream NOooooooooooooooooooo like Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi. Sure they’d rather have the customer buy HP then go buy a Clariion or something. But throw these guys a bone. Kill EVA and use the money to discount 3PAR more in the marketplace.

P2000/MSA – gotta keep that stuff, there will probably always be some market for DAS

Insights

I had the opportunity to ask some high level questions of David and got some interesting responses, he seems like a cool guy

3PAR Competition

David harped a lot on how other storage architectures from the big manufacturers were designed 15-20 years ago. I asked him – why does he think – given 3PAR technology is 10+ years old at this point that these other manufacturers haven’t copied it to some degree? It has obvious technological advantages it just baffles me why others haven’t copied it.

His answer came down to a couple of things. The main point was 3PAR was basically just lucky. They were in the right place, at the right time, with the right product. They successfully navigated the tech recession when at least two other utility storage startups could not and folded (I forgot their names, I’m terrible with names). He said the big companies pulled back on R&D spending as a result of the recession and as such didn’t innovate as much in this area, which left a window of opportunity for 3PAR.

He also mentioned two other companies that were founded at about the same time to address the same market – utility computing. He mentioned Vmware as one of them, the other was the inventor of the first blade system, forgot the name. Vmware I think I have to dispute though. I seem to recall Vmware “stumbling” into the server market on accident rather than targeting it directly. I mean I remember using Vmware before it was even Vmware workstation or GSX. It was just a program used to run another OS on top of Linux (that was the only OS Vmware ran on at the time). I recall reading that the whole server virtualization movement came way later and caught Vmware off guard. as much as it caught everyone else off guard.

He also gave an example in EMC and their VMAX product line. He said that EMC mis understood what the 3PAR architecture was about – in that they thought it was just a basic cluster design, so EMC re-worked their system to be a cluster – the result is VMAX. But it still falls short in several design aspects, EMC wasn’t paying attention.

I was kind of underwhelmed when the VMAX was announced, I mean sure it is big, and bad, and expensive, but they didn’t seem to do anything really revolutionary in it. Same goes for the Hitachi VSP. I fully expected both to do at least some sort of sub disk distributed RAID. But they didn’t.

Utilizing flash as a real time cache

David harped a lot on 3PAR’s ability to be able to respond to unpredictable workloads. This is true, I’ve seen it time and time again, it’s one reason why I really don’t want to use any other storage platform at this point in time given the opportunity.

Something I thought really was innovative that came out of EMC in the past year or two is their Flash Cache product (I think that’s the right name), the ability to use high speed flash as both a read and a write cache. The ability to bulk the cache levels up into the multiples of terabytes for big cloud operations.

His response was – we already do that – with RAM cache. I clarified a bit more in saying scaling out the cache even more with flash well beyond what you can do with RAM. He kind of ducked the question saying it was a bit too technical/architectural for the crowd in the room. 3PAR needs to have this technology. My key point to him is the 3PAR tools like Adaptive Optimization and Dynamic Optimization are great tools – but they are not real time. I want something that is real time. It seemed he acknowledged that point – the lack of the real time nature of the existing technologies as a weak point – hopefully HP/3PAR addresses it soon in some form.

In my previous post, Gabriel commented on how the new next gen IBM XIV will be able to have up to 7.5TB of read cache via SSD. I know NetApp can have a couple TB worth of read cache in their higher end boxes. As far as I know only EMC has the technology to do both read and write. I can’t say how well it works, since I’ve never used it and know nobody that has this EMC gear, but it is a good technology to have, especially as flash matures more.

I just think how neat it would be to have, say a 1.5-2PB system running SATA disks with an extra 100TB(2.5-5% of total storage) of flash cache on top of it.

Bringing storage intelligence to the application layer

Another question I asked him was his thoughts around a broader industry trend which seems to be trying to bring the intelligence of storage out of the storage system and put it higher up in the stack – given the advanced functionality of a 3PAR system are they threatened at all by this? The examples I gave were Exchange and Oracle ASM.

He focused on Oracle, mentioning that Oracle was one of the original investors in 3PAR and as a result there was a lot of close collaboration between the two companies, including the development of the ASM technology itself.

He mentioned one of the VPs of Oracle, I forget if he was a key ASM architect or developer or something, but someone high up in the storage strategy involving ASM — in the early days this guy was very gung ho, absolutely convinced that running the world on DAS with ASM was the way to go. Don’t waste your money on enterprise storage, we can do it higher in the stack and you can use the cheap storage, save yourself a lot of money.

David said once this Oracle guy saw 3PAR storage powering an Oracle system he changed his mind, he no longer believed that DAS was the future.

The key point David was trying to make was – bringing storage intelligence higher up in the stack is OK if  your underlying storage sucks. But if you have a good storage system, you can’t really match that functionality/performance/etc that high up in the stack and it’s not worth considering.

Whether he is right or not is another question, for me I think it depends on the situation, but any chance I get I will of course lean towards 3PAR for my back end disk needs rather than use DAS.

In short – he does not feel threatened at all by this “trend”. Though if HP is unwilling or unable to get peer motion working between their products when things like Storage vMotion and Oracle ASM can do this higher up in the stack, there certainly is a case for storage intelligence at the application layer.

Best of Breed

David also seemed to harp a lot about best of breed. He knocked his competitors for having a mis mash of technologies, specifically he mentioned market leading technologies instead of best of breed. Early in his presentation he touted HP’s market leading position in servers, and their #2 position in networking (you could say that is market leading).

He also tried to justify that the HP integrated cloud stack is comprised of best of breed technologies, it just happens to be two out of the three are considered market leading, no coincidence there.

Best of breed is really a perception issue when you get down to it. Where do you assign value in the technology. Do you just want the cheapest you can get? Do you want the most advanced software? Do you want the fastest system? Do you want the most reliable? Ease of use? interoperable ? flexibility? buzz word compliant? Big name brand?

Because of that, many believe these vertically integrated stacks won’t go very far. There will be some customer wins of course, but those will more often then not be wins based on technology but based on other factors, political (most likely), financial (buy from us and we’ll finance it all no questions asked), or maybe just the warm and fuzzy feeling incompetent CIOs get when they buy from a big name that says they will stand behind the products.

I did ask David what is HP’s stance on a more open design for this “cloud” thing. Not building a cloud based on a vertically integrated stack. His response was sort of what I expected – none of the other stack vendors are open, we aren’t either so we don’t view it as an important point.

I was kind of sad that he never used the 3cV term, really, I think was likely the first stack that was out there, and it wasn’t even official, there was no big marketing or sales push behind it.

For me, my best of breed storage is 3PAR, it may have 1 or 2% market share (more now), so it surely is not market leading(might make it there with HP behind it), but for my needs it’s best of breed.

Switching, likewise, Extreme – maybe 1 – 1.5% market share, not market leading either, but for me, best of breed.

Fibre Channel – I like Qlogic. Probably not best of breed, certainly not market leading at least for switches, but damn easy to use and it gets the job done for me. Ironically enough while digging up links for this post I came across this, which is an article suggesting Qlogic should buy Extreme, back in 2009. I somewhat fear, the most likely company to buy Extreme at this point is Oracle. I hope Oracle does not buy them, but Oracle is trying to play the whole stack game too and they don’t really have any in house networking, unlike the other players. Maybe Oracle will jump on someone like Arista instead, be a cheaper price, ala Pillar.

Servers – I do like HP best of course for the enterprise space – they don’t compete as well in scale out though.

Vmware on the other hand happens to be in a somewhat unique position being both the market leader and for the most part best of breed, though others are rapidly closing the gap in the breed area, Vmware had many years with no competition.

Summary

All in all it was pretty good, a lot more formal than I was expecting, I saw 3 people I knew from 3PAR, I sort of expected to see more (I fully was expecting to see Marc Farley there! where were you Marc!).

David did harp on quite a bit using Intel processors, something that Chuck from EMC likes to harp on too. I did not ask this question of David, because I think I know the answer. The question would be does he think HP will migrate to Intel CPUs, and away from their purpose built ASIC? I think the answer to that question is no, at least not in the next few years(barring some revolution in general purpose processors). With 3PAR’s distributed design I’m just not sure how a general purpose CPU could handle calculating the parity for what could be as many as say half a million RAID arrays on a storage system like the V800 without the assistance of an ASIC or FPGA. I really do not like HP’s pushing of the Intel brand so much being a partner of HP and all, at least with regards to 3PAR. Because really – the Intel CPU does not do much at all in the 3PAR boxes, it never has.

Just look at IBM XIV – they do distributed RAID, though they do mirroring only, and they top out at 180 disks, even with 60 2.4Ghz Intel CPU cores (120 threads), with a combined 180MB of CPU cache. Mirroring is a fairly simple task vs doing parity calculations.

Frankly, I’d rather see an AMD processor in there, especially one with 12-16 cores. The chipsets that power the higher end Intel processors are fairly costly, vs AMD’s chipset scales down to 1 CPU socket without an issue. I look at a storage system that has dual or quad core CPUs in it and I think what a waste. Things may be different if the storage manufacturers included the latest & greatest Intel 8 and 10 core processors but thus-far I have not seen anything close to that.

David also mentioned a road VMware is traveling, moving away from file systems to support VMs to a 1:1 relationship between LUNs and VMs, making life a lot more granular. He postulated (there’s a word I’ve never used before) that this technology(forgot the name) will make protocols like NFS obsolete(at least when it comes to hosting VMs), which was a really interesting concept to me.

At the end of the day, for the types of storage systems I have managed myself, for the types of companies I have worked for I don’t get enough bang for the buck out of many of the more advanced software technologies on these storage systems. Whether it is simple replication stuff, or space reclamation, I’m still not sold on Adaptive optimization or other automatic storage tiering techniques, even application aware snapshots. Sure these are all nice features to have, but they are low on my priority list, I have other things I want to buy first before I invest in these things, myself at least. If money is no object – sure, load up on everything you got! I feel the same way about VMware and their software value add strategy. Give me the basics and let me go from there.  Basics being a solid underlying system that is high performance, predictable and easy to manage.

There was a lot of talk about cloud and their integrated stacks and stuff like that but that was about as interesting to me as sitting through a NetApp presentation. At least with most of the NetApp presentations I sat through I got some fancy steak to go with it, just some snacks at this HP event.

One more question I have for 3PAR – what the hell is your service processor running that requires 317W of power! Is it using Intel technology circa 2004 ?

This actually ended up being a lot longer than I had originally anticipated, nearly 4200 words!

October 18, 2011

Cisco’s new 10GbE push – a little HP and Dell too

Filed under: Networking — Tags: , , , , — Nate @ 7:56 pm

Just got done reading this from our friends at The Register.

More than anything else this caught my eye:

On the surface it looks pretty impressive, I mean it would be interesting to see exactly how Cisco configured the competing products as in which 60 Juniper devices or 70 HP devices did they use and how were they connected?

One thing that would of been interesting to call out in such a configuration, is the number of logical devices needed for management. For example I know Brocade’s VDX product is some fancy way of connecting lots of devices sort of like more traditional stacking just at a larger scale for ease of management. I’m not sure whether or not the VDX technology extends to their chassis product as Cisco’s configuration above seems to imply using chassis switches. I believe Juniper’s Qfabric is similar. I’m not sure if HP or Arista have such technology(I don’t believe they do). I don’t think Cisco does – but they don’t claim to need it either with this big switch. So a big part of the question is managing so many devices, or just managing one. Cost of the hardware/software is one thing..

HP recently announced a revamp of their own 10GbE products, at least the 1U variety. I’ve been working off and on with HP people recently and there was a brief push to use HP networking equipment but they gave up pretty quick. They mentioned they were going to have “their version” of the 48-port 10-gig switch soon, but it turns out it’s still a ways away – early next year is when it’s supposed to ship, even if I wanted it  (which I don’t) – it’s too late for this project.

I dug into their fact sheet, which was really light on information to see what, if anything stood out with these products. I did not see anything that stood out in a positive manor, I did see this which I thought was kind of amusing –

Industry-leading HP Intelligent Resilient Framework (IRF) technology radically simplifies the architecture of server access networks and enables massive scalability—this provides up to 300% higher scalability as compared to other ToR products in the market.

Correct me if I’m wrong – but that looks like what other vendors would call Stacking, or Virtual Chassis. An age-old technology, but the key point here was the up to 300% higher scalability. Another way of putting it is at least 50% less scalable – when your comparing it to the Extreme Networks Summit X670V(which is shipping I just ordered some).

The Summit X670 series is available in two models: Summit X670V and Summit X670. Summit X670V provides high density for 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching in a small 1RU form factor. The switch supports up to 64 ports in one system and 448 ports in a stacked system using high-speed SummitStack-V160*, which provides 160 Gbps throughput and distributed forwarding. The Summit X670 model provides up to 48 ports in one system and up to 352 ports in a stacked system using SummitStack-V longer distance (up to 40 km with 10GBASE-ER SFP+) stacking technology.

In short, it’s twice as scalable as the HP IRF feature, because it goes up to 8 devices (56x10GbE each), and HP’s goes up to 4 devices (48x10GbE each — or perhaps they can do 56 too with breakout cables since both switches have the same number of physical 10GbE and 40GbE ports).

The list price on the HP switches is WAY high too, The Register calls it out at $38,000 for a 24-port switch. The X670 from Extreme has a list price of about $25,000 for 48-ports(I see it on-line for as low as about $17k). There was no disclosure of HP’s pricing for their 48-port switch.

Extreme has another 48-port switch which is cheaper (almost half the cost if I recall right – I see it on-line going for as low as $11,300) but it’s for very specialized applications where latency is really important. If I recall right they removed the PHY (?) from the switch which dramatically reduces functionality and introduces things like very short cable length limits but also slashes the latency (and cost). You wouldn’t want to use those for your VMware setup(well if you were really cost constrained these are probably better than some other alternatives especially if your considering this or 1GbE), but you may want them if your doing HPC or something with shared memory or high frequency stock trading (ugh!).

The X670 also has (or will have? I’ll find out soon) a motion sensor on the front of the switch which I thought was curious, but seems like a neat security feature, being able to tell if someone is standing in front of your switch screwing with it. It also apparently has the ability(or will have the ability) to turn off all of the LEDs on the switch when someone gets near it, and turn them back on when they go away.

(ok back on topic, Cisco!)

I looked at the Cisco slide above, and thought to myself, really, can they be that far ahead? I certainly do not go out on a routine basis and see how many devices and connectivity between them that I need to achieve  X number of line rate ports, I’ll keep it simple, if you need a large number of line rate ports just use a chassis product(you may need a few of them). It is interesting to see though, assuming it’s anywhere close to being accurate.

When I asked myself the question “Can they be that far ahead?” I wasn’t thinking of Cisco, I think I’m up to 7 readers now — you know me better than that! 🙂

I was thinking of the Extreme Networks Black Diamond X-Series which was announced (note not yet shipping…) a few months ago.

  • Cisco claims to do 768 x 10GbE ports in 25U (Extreme will do it in 14.5U)
  • Cisco claims to do 10W per 10GbE/port (Extreme will do it in 5W/port)
  • Cisco claims to do it with 1 device .. Well that’s hard to beat but Extreme can meet them, it’s hard to do it with less than one device.
  • Cisco’s new top end taps out at very respectable 550Gbit per slot (Extreme will do 1.2Tb)
  • Cisco claims to do it with a list price of $1200/port. I don’t know what Extreme’s pricing will be but typically Cisco is on the very high end for costs.

Though I don’t know how Cisco gets to 768 ports, Extreme does it via 40GbE ports and breakout cables (as far as I know), so in reality the X-series is a 40GbE switch (and I think 40GbE only – to start with unless you use the break out cables to get to 10GbE).  It was a little over a year ago that Extreme was planning on shipping 40GbE at a cost of $1,000/port. Certainly the X-series is a different class of product than what they were talking about a while ago, but prices have also come down since.

X-Series is shipping “real soon now’.  I’m sure if you ask them they’ll tell you more specifics.

It is interesting to me, and kind of sad how far Force10 has fallen in the 10GbE area, I mean they seemed to basically build themselves on the back of 10GbE(or at least tried to), but I look at their current products on the very high end, and short from the impressive little 40GbE switch they have, they seem to top out at 140 line rate 10GbE in 21U. Dell will probably do well with them, I’m sure it’ll be a welcome upgrade to those customers using Procurve, uh I mean Powerconnect? That’s what Dell call(ed) their switches right?

As much as it pains me I do have to give Dell some props for doing all of these acquisitions recently and beefing up their own technology base, whether it’s in storage, or networking they’ve come a long way (more so in storage, need more time to tell in networking). I have not liked Dell myself for quite some time, a good chunk of it is because they really had no innovation, but part of it goes back to the days before Dell shipped AMD chips and Dell was getting tons of kick backs from Intel for staying an Intel exclusive provider.

In the grand scheme of things such numbers don’t mean a whole lot, I mean how many networks in the world can actually push this kind of bandwidth? Outside of the labs I really think any organization would be very hard pressed to need such fabric capacity, but it’s there — and it’s not all that expensive.

I just dug up an old price list I had from Extreme – from late November 2005. An 6-port 10GbE module for their Black Diamond 10808 switch (I had two at the time) had a list price of $36,000. For you math buffs out there that comes to $9,000 per line rate port.

That particular product was oversubscribed (hence it not being $6,000/port) as well having a mere 40Gbps of switch fabric capacity per slot, or a total of 320Gbps for the entire switch (it was marketed as a 1.2Tb switch but hardware never came out to push the backplane to those levels – I had to dig into the depths of the documentation to find that little disclosure – naturally I found it after I purchased, didn’t matter for us though I’d be surprised if we pushed more than 5Gbps at any one point!). If I recall right the switch was 24U too. My switches were 1GbE only, cost reasons 🙂

How far we’ve come..

September 21, 2011

HP considering replacing CEO

Filed under: General — Tags: — Nate @ 8:53 am

This would be great news if it happens, seems HP is considering replacing their CEO. I don’t know if Meg Whitman would be a good candidate or not that’s not really my area of expertise, but Leo’s reign has been a disaster to-date, not only for the company, but the customers, and their stock price.

Not that the previous CEO was good, he was terrible too, being known for slashing budgets, cutting corners for short term profits, and killing morale across the company. HP execs seem to be doing everything they can to kill the company.

I’m seeing on CNBC “Significant number of HP board members want to replace Apotheker”. Which is somewhat ironic considering people believed that Leo recently rebuilt the board around people that would support him. I guess they may not be so loyal after all.

If the CEO goes hopefully goes the bid for that UK software company Autonomy – HP should re-invest in their own stuff, several folks have pointed out the lack of HP’s R&D in recent years has almost forced HP to acquire a lot of companies and in the end they pay a much higher premium for that vs doing things themselves, just look at how much HP has spent on acquisitions vs IBM (the data for both is incomplete but the trend shows HP running at about double the rate of IBM for what data is available.

HP has Vertica, they have 3PAR, they could use some more advanced networking stuff 3COM just isn’t there, nor is Procurve (I still believe HP bought 3COM for nothing more than market presence in China).

August 31, 2011

WebOS device sales still hectic

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — Nate @ 9:28 am

HP announced recently they are going to manufacture another round of Touchpads to meet more demand, and limit one TP per customer. Best Buy has also been selling TPs with a limit of one per customer.

You can see in the Precentral Forums as well as the Palm Developer forums the frustration by the existing user base that many are not able to get their hands on hardware.

The limit per customer should help get TPs in to more hands without having to resort to the scalping market, though many folks wanted to buy a couple extras as gifts. One is better than none..

While the Touchpad continues to make headlines with the fire sale what hasn’t made any headlines is the desperate struggle many users are going through to try to get their hands on the HP Pre3 which was released in Europe mere days before the big HP announcement that they were getting out of hardware.

My own experience mimics that of many others, I put in an order to a UK reseller on the 20th whom appeared to have stock on hand. It took a few days to get past their security checks but I got past them, and then they went to go to their distributor to get stock (they apparently had none at the time), and their distributor told them they couldn’t have any stock, someone upstream (maybe HP, maybe another carrier the speculation runs wild) has blocked it. So the company refunded my money and that of many others who ordered. Unfortunately this took until Thursday of last week to find out I was not going to be getting Pre3s from this company.

So I set out on a quest to find Pre3s from someone else, every place I came across said no stock, there was talk about the Palm Eurostore selling Pre3s, BUT they only require both that your billing and shipping addresses are in Europe. No shipping to the US.

There is a UK reseller mobiles.co.uk which is requiring all orders be shipped to the UK. They accept US billing and shipping addresses but have canceled every order that had one after the order was placed.

There are people trying to order from expansys.fr over in France whom have a stock of AZERTY based Pre3s (I had never heard of AZERTY until then), but their shipping forms do not list U.S. as an option (I think people have tried anyways not sure of results). I have seen other stories of people in Asia getting their orders canceled by expansys.fr with the company directing those users to the Asian version of the site (which has no Pre3s of course). While it’s apparently not hard to change the keyboard layout in the phone itself, there is still the physical keyboard where the keys won’t be right once the mapping is changed. But users are willing to make the compromise in order to get their hands on the device (I would too if they’d ship to the US). I was about to order from them when I saw the billing address had no place to put a state. Only City, Country, and street address. Also no mention of U.S. shipping options, so it seemed pretty clear to me that they weren’t going to ship my order so I didn’t submit it.

So I began searching Ebay and came across another company KICK MOBILE over in the UK and I ordered a pair of Pre3s from them last Thursday morning. I emailed them later asking if they really did have stock because the last place did not, they said they are sold out *right now* but are 99.9% confident they will get 100 units the following day. The people/person at Kick Mobile has been very nice and friendly. Unfortunately Friday came and mostly went and Kick Mobile sent out an update saying they have not gotten stock yet but have confirmed their upstream supplier has 100 units set aside for them (out of 1500 units on hand), and they are still highly confident they will get them because Kick Mobiles is doing them a favor in buying a couple hundred older Blackberry phones to liquidate. They said they won’t know for certain until the end of this month or maybe the 1st or 2nd of September. The upstream supplier was waiting for authorization to release the units to the resellers.

I haven’t gotten an update directly yet (have not asked) but did see someone else post an update from them saying that Kick Mobiles no longer has confidence they will get that stock, though the final nail is not in the coffin yet (probably will be in the next 24 hours though).

What’s more frustrating is that Kick Mobile mentioned if I had placed the order a mere 24 hours earlier I would of gotten the phones. Getting the bad news back from the first reseller took too long!

I don’t blame any of the resellers they are all doing everything (or have done) they can to try to get the product to the desperate customers and have done a great job.

So yesterday I went on Ebay again and found a pair of Pre3s from what appears to be an end user who had two of them, and I immediately hit the buy it now button to buy one. I’m normally not one who likes to use auction sites I don’t know why I just don’t feel comfortable doing it but at the moment if I want a Pre3 (and I want one as you can clearly see) I have little choice at this point, it seems as time goes on there are fewer and fewer available, even though there is good information that says there are at least hundreds to thousands being held up in warehouses with an uncertain future. You can probably bet there are hundreds to thousands of AT&T and Verizon branded Pre3s as well which people speculate may just be outright destroyed rather than sold.

With each attempt to buy a Pre3 the unit price has gone up by roughly $125. There’s one report of someone paying over $900 for one.

There have been rumors of a fire sale of Pre3s as well but so far very few have been able to get them at those prices, even the official Palm Eurostore says they were not able to resell at those prices and in fact is unable to get more stock and is canceling all outstanding orders and not accepting new orders. Not a good sign. Contrary to initial beliefs the Eurostore is not directly affiliated with HP or Palm but is a 3rd party reseller like most others. From their web site

Update Wed 31st Aug 15:00 :
From the contacts we initiated since last Friday ;
– We have cancelled and refunded all orders where we received notification to cancel.
– We have shipped all orders for those people we had contacted and who accepted the order for a single unit at the standard/agreed price.
– We are still awaiting response from some of the people we contacted
We are now going to set a deadline of midday (BST) on Thursday 1st Sep. A final reminder email has gone out to these people. We will have no option but to cancel those orders after that point if we have not heard back from them.

The European Pre3 only works on one of the two AT&T 3G frequencies, so will be crippled to some degree(mainly when used in doors), by contrast I read that the way T-mobile uses their frequencies the Pre3 would have no 3G coverage at all. T-mobile apparently uses one frequency for upstream and one for downstream, AT&T has both frequencies available for up and down.

I’ll take what I can get though, assuming I can get the Pre3. I got a Pre2 in yesterday (can’t use it yet because I don’t have a SIM card). Was supposed to get a Veer (with AT&T SIM) yesterday, but fedex screwed me on the delivery claiming my address was wrong and before I could pick the package up at the local facility shipped it back to AT&T.  I have another Fedex package coming from HP today with a Touchpad and some accessories in it, will see if they screw up again. I’ve recieved a lot of UPS and USPS packages at my address so I know it’s right, it is a new address, the building has only existed for about 1.5 years but hard to believe Fedex hasn’t delivered a package here before, there’s a couple hundred people living here.

While the initial reviews of the Pre3 are very positive at least from the WebOS community(which is biased of course), they are not suitable devices for the general public in the U.S. as you will have to jump through hoops and stuff to use them due to the frequency differences and general lack of support. But for more hard core technical users it’s clear it’s by far the best phone to come out of Palm since the first Pre launched back in 2009.

In case your wondering why I have been trying so hard to get my hands on a Pre 3. Well part of it as I have mentioned in the past is, for several different personal reasons (won’t elaborate again here), I won’t really go near a Android, iOS or Windows mobile device for myself at least. The Pre2 and Pre3 will keep me on a platform I like for a while to come until I need to make a decision about where to go at that point. I’ve been using a feature phone from Sanyo for the past 8 months while I waited for the Pre3 to be released. It’s an OK phone, I like that I don’t have to charge it often, though it’s not as nice as the Sanyo phones I used to have, the software is quite different, and in general not as good.  It may be because the phone might just be Sanyo in name since they were bought by Kyocera (the phone itself says Sanyo by Kyrocera) Though I guess one thing I will be able to finally test without being too paranoid is how rugged this rugged phone really is, your supposed to be able to completely submerge it in water and have it be OK. I’ll finally test that out!

Meanwhile my order for 4 Touchpad 16GBs which was accepted by HP’s systems on August 21st at 2AM (26 hours before their cutoff period for canceling orders) is still pending shipment, I assume they are out of stock now. The order status page says it is in an “Admin” state. My 2nd order  was processed before my first which I thought was unusual. My 2nd order is the 5th Touchpad with accessories, in order to secure a discount on accessories I had to buy another TP. I was in such a hurry to buy the original Touchpads I did not pay attention to accessories or discounts on the 21st as I was busy fighting server errors on HP’s side.

My original Palm Pre, which has been disconnected from the Sprint network for 8 months did something unusual on Monday – it showed I had a new voice mail. I checked my normal Sprint phone it too said I had a voice mail. I would not of expected the Pre to show that (it never has before). Just because I was curious I tried to check the voice mail on the Pre and got a message from Sprint saying my account could not be verified. So clearly the phone wasn’t authorized to operate on Sprint anymore, must’ve been some sort of temporary hole opened in the Sprint network which allowed the phone to log in for a moment and detect the new voice mail.

I only wish management at HP cared enough to handle this whole situation better in the first place. I do feel sorry for the entire WebOS division (hardware+software), including the leadership who were just as blindsided by this as everyone else. I can’t imagine the stress the leadership is under to try to maintain morale at this point.

Over 2,000 words for this post, not bad.

August 21, 2011

Windows Phone 7 is dead

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — Nate @ 7:03 am

That is the headline of this news article, and as I read the article, and more importantly the comments I couldn’t help but think about the parallels between both of those and HP’s now defunct WebOS (yeah I know officially HP has committed to continue support but most people expect nothing to come of it unfortunately).

Here is part of the list, see the article for the rest

  1. Sales are plummeting – Same was said for WebOS
  2. Mango (new version of Windows phone 7) is taking too long – Same was said for WebOS 3, Pre3, and the Pre3’s lack of running WebOS 3
  3. Customer’s don’t care – Similar things said about WebOS
  4. Nokia doesn’t matter – HP at least believed the Palm brand didn’t matter since they killed the Palm name earlier in the year..

I’d say a good 8 out of 10 of those points could of applied to WebOS/Palm as well. I also suspect that the same could possibly be said of RIM as well.

But the comments from the community responding to the article were much more similar to what the hard core WebOS community would say than I would of expected and thought that was fascinating.

Maybe it’s coincidence, but I have seen more than one suggestion from the WebOS community that Windows Phone 7 is the closest user experience to WebOS.

I was never a strong defender of the WebOS platform, I used it for myself, thought it was a solid product line, never tried to talk someone else into using it, though often times I wanted to try (unlike some other products/companies I talk about on this site). I suppose deep down I knew they needed “more” to appeal to more users so I was patient  – waiting until the day they had those core elements completed, HP wasn’t so patient though.

For me, I ordered a pair of unlocked Pre 3 phones from the UK for about $500 each last night in the hopes they will ship. Far more than I’ve ever spent on a phone before, but given the retirement of the hardware and no future prospects of new hardware at this point, ironically it was a pretty easy decision to make. I just hope they have stock. The price point almost assures there won’t be a mad dash to buy them like with the Touchpad. If I get lucky and HP has a fire sale of the remaining stockpile of Pre3s in the US, I’ll pickup more. My only real concern is batteries – what’s the best way of storing a battery if your not going to use it for a year or more ? Should it be fully discharged? Should I keep it on the charger the whole time? Maybe it doesn’t matter what I do.

At this point I guess I’m glad HP left the Pre 3 with WebOS 2.2 where there was/is a stronger development base on the Mojo(?) SDK with many more applications. WebOS 3 by contrast that runs on the Touchpad uses another, incompatible SDK Enyo.

One of the strange decisions HP/Palm made was when they built the original SDK they didn’t take into account large screens, so when the Tablet came around they had to re-do it. Unfortunately for some reason they didn’t make the new SDK good for small screens for some reason (I assume that reason was lack of time and resources for the schedule), so developers were stuck having to use two different ways of writing apps to support the Phone vs Tablet, not a good way to attract developers from competing platforms.

But like most of the faults I believe it would of been fixed at some point in the not too distant future(~1 year or so), once Palm had the ability to stabilize and catch their breath from the break neck pace they’ve been working at for years now.

I think what hurt Palm/HP/WebOS more than anything is they didn’t have enough resources to pull off what they needed to in the time allowed. I have little doubt they tried to hire like crazy after HP bought them but there just wasn’t enough time to develop these 3 products, and ramp up hiring / get people familiar enough with the platform to be really productive at developing by the time they had to launch their products.

Made me think back to this post about a year ago.

The main difference between WP7 and WebOS, as I’ve mentioned before, is that Microsoft is not going to give up on their platform. WP7 may die, or may not, I don’t know. But if it does MS will re-work it, and try again. I had expected and hoped, as mentioned before, HP was going to do the same with WebOS.

August 19, 2011

Touchpad fire sale starts tomorrow

Filed under: Events,General — Tags: , — Nate @ 4:57 pm

UPDATED HP has apparently given their partners notice to liquidate everything – 16GB Touchpads will go for $99, and 32GB go for $149 according to Pre Central.

 

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…

HP in trouble..

Filed under: General — Tags: — Nate @ 7:23 am

HP is certainly not going to die any time soon, but it seems that a large number of people(some of which are investors) did not like what they heard from HP yesterday sending their stock down about 21% to levels not seen in what seems more than five years.

Myself I don’t agree with their strategy either in trying to get rid of their PC business as well as kill WebOS – a market that is growing faster than anything else right now and most people seem to think is the future (mobile computing stuff). Speaking of mobile, I was surprised last year when looking at their site that the iPAQ was still around – I recall that as being a popular device about a decade ago though haven’t heard the brand mentioned in many years. I wonder if HP will keep that stuff around or kill it with WebOS.

Then there is the acquisition of this Atonomy software company for $10B, never heard of the company myself, looked briefly at their web site and am not familiar with the space. I saw, or read yesterday that Atonomy is on track for $1B in revenues this year.

I’d of course prefer HP invest $10B in WebOS that would be a much better strategy in, as previously mentioned, a much faster growing market.

It is nice to see investors punishing the stock today, after writing about WebOS yesterday I saw that HP had indeed replaced roughly half of it’s board members as well as the CEO since the acquisition of Palm last year.

Another interesting flip flop that the CEO of HP did is indeed on the consumer products, saw earlier on CNBC this morning one of the anchors of the show dug up a quote from earlier this year where the current CEO of HP said the consumer unit of the company gave HP “an immense competitive advantage” (his exact words). Now, barely six months later they can’t wait to get rid of it.

I know really nothing about their consumer PC stuff – I wouldn’t ever buy one of their laptops (prefer Toshiba now that IBM Thinkpads are gone), desktops are pretty generic no matter where you go, printers..whatever. PCs aren’t going away any time soon.

Unfortunately – it seems like in general more signs of short term thinking a problem that plagues both our public an private sectors, and only seems to be getting worse as time goes on. HP’s previous CEO was known for gutting the company of R&D and cutting costs..

To me it sounds like too much of a knee jerk reaction. As a local reporter here put it

What a waste.

August 18, 2011

RIP: WebOS

Filed under: linux — Tags: , , , , — Nate @ 7:05 pm

UPDATED I have been a user of WebOS based devices for a couple of years now, I bought a Palm Pre in late 2009, and a Touchpad on launch day. WebOS in general has been a pretty good user experience, it worked quite well from a functional perspective in my view. The devices weren’t the fastest(though since I really never used any others I had little frame of reference), I think mainly to the web-centric nature of the OS instead of running mostly native code.

The Pre was my first Palm-branded product, though I did own a couple of Handspring Visors for a long time.

WebOS seems to have been, for the most part widely praised from a user friendliness angle from a wide selection  of folks, though that alone wasn’t enough to carry the platform forward for HP.

Myself, I had a firm belief that HP was committed to the platform for the long run – at least 2-4 years before making any decisions about the future. Primarily because of the situation of the market. With Microsoft, Nokia, and RIM all struggling in one way or another, and wide fragmentation of Android leading to, from what I’ve read, poor user experiences on the platforms (granted there are probably some really good ones but given the number of Android devices it appears most of them are pretty bad). There was, and still is room for someone to play in the space with a unique product offering.

I can only assume the new leadership at HP just didn’t agree with the previous leadership which is too bad. I mean it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize it’s going to take multiple billions of dollars of investment to build up such an ecosystem, you don’t need an army of consultants and market analysts to figure that one out. Unfortunately for Palm, WebOS, and the user base the new management didn’t want to commit to the platform in the way they needed to in order to drive it.

The best comparison I have I think is perhaps Microsoft – they have been in the mobile phone space in one form or another for more than a decade, and they have low single digit market share to show for it — but they haven’t given up (and it looks like they won’t either). I felt that same level of commitment from HP early on, unfortunately I guess the folks that make the big decisions decided to change their mind and cut their losses(either that or the people that make the big decisions themselves got changed out).

It wouldn’t surprise me if the current HP management wouldn’t of been willing to pay the $3 billion for 3PAR either if they had that opportunity today. Well I’m glad HP has 3PAR — if for nothing else it kept them out of the hands of Dell. Their quarterly report today mentioned “triple digit growth” for the 3PAR platform, which in general is kind of confusing – I mean it seems most everyone is reporting massive storage growth — this can’t all be net new storage — someone has to be at the losing end of it — who ? HDS ? IBM ? (I haven’t noticed either talk too much about growth but I haven’t tried to look for their comments either). Maybe in 3PAR’s case most of their growth is at the expense of EVA(which should just go away), I haven’t tried to find details. From the folks I know at 3PAR it certainly seems like they can’t keep up with demand.

The news that they are killing WebOS is quite sad to me, it was a platform with a lot of promise, it just needed more work – I have no doubt they were short handed and rushed to market with many things which hurt them — but it was a choice, either release something now, as a sort of stop gap, or wait 6-12 or maybe even 18 months and release something good. You lose either way (at least until you have a polished end-to-end system) but I think the strategy they chose they “lost” less. You have to keep the news coming, the products coming etc.

I plan to keep my Touchpad myself, and if I see a fire sale on them will probably pick up more, it’s a good device, I’ve been using it pretty much daily for casual use since I bought it and really have very few complaints (even before the 3.0.2 OS upgrade).

If the Pre3 does come out in some form (un clear whether or not they ever manufactured it), I’ll try to pick up one/more of those as well – I’d assume no carriers will sign on to sell it, so the only way to really use it would be unlocked, on a GSM network. That is assuming that the device isn’t a total brick. I was happy with the functionality I got on my original Pre with WebOS 1.4, in some cases I’m not hard to please (hey – I’ve been running Linux as my primary Desktop since ~1997 if that gives you any idea). The 64GB “4G” Touchpad was supposed to launch soon, but now who knows – I suspect the launch will get canned.

Even if HP continued WebOS development I have no doubt the Pre3 would struggle to find relevance in the market given it’s late arrival. Most folks were expecting it months ago – the most recent estimations put it at mid September – right smack when the iPhone 5 is supposed to launch, as well as the free iPhone 3GS.

As time has gone on the Pre3 hardware has gone from looking really good to nothing special. Compound that with the fact that HP apparently wasn’t going to use the next generation WebOS 3.0 on the Pre3, instead using the older generation of WebOS software with a completely different SDK, I suppose it wouldn’t be too far fetched to say the Pre3 was going to be mostly DOA, performing no better(perhaps worse) than previous WebOS devices due to the poor timing of it’s release. I have struggled to try to think of why it was taking them so long to get the Pre3 out the door, especially since they weren’t going to use WebOS 3.

I’m not expecting anyone else to pick up WebOS — instead I think others will just mimic it’s functionality on their own platforms – sort of like how RIM did with the multitasking on their Playbook tablet.

What was more surprising to me in general was that tablets in general are not selling. As many people have said – there really isn’t much of a tablet market out there – there is an iPad market, but not much of a tablet market. I have read things recently that seem to indicate almost all of the Android tablets are faring even worse than the HP Touchpad was – Android as an aggregate has been doing fairly well but the individual companies pitching their tablets – the sales are quite poor in general (with a couple of standout exceptions), There’s gotta be what – 50+ different Android tablets on the market now?

I’m really too sad to be mad at this point, I have no regrets in buying into the platform – it’s more sad about seeing such a promising platform be killed prematurely.

I suppose I should end this on a positive note — the one thing HP did give WebOS was another chance, Palm was pretty much flat broke when HP bought them. So I thank HP for that…

UPDATE – Barely 24 hours after they kill the platform they launch the 64GB White Touchpad for a mere $599.

 

The 64GB "White" Touchpad - what they don't have Photoshop? Or maybe they just don't care.

I guess not everyone got the memo yet.

 

July 2, 2011

HP Touchpad – first thoughts and tips

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — Nate @ 12:46 pm

I have been anticipating the release of the HP WebOS-based Touchpad for several months now. I picked one up yesterday at Best Buy shortly after they opened. As I expected there was no line around the block to get them, I got there about 10:45 (they opened at 10) and I believe was the first person to buy one, they hadn’t even unpacked the pallet yet. There was one other person there that was looking really closely at the Touchpad, other than that not many customers in the store.

I have been using it for a few hours and wanted to post a early review of it as well as a tip which seems to work around a bug related to copying files to the device  (at least in Linux).

I’ll preface this by saying – I don’t like Apple, I don’t like Google, and am not that fond of Microsoft either. So that said, WebOS is a natural choice for me, and it was one of the reasons I decided to pick up a Palm Pre a couple of years ago(the other being the ability to run ‘classic’ PalmOS apps in an emulator – this option is no longer available on current models). Turns out the OS was quite a bit better than I was expecting and I came to like the software quite a bit.

 

 

I have spent probably a grand total of 10 minutes of time using the iPhone (from various friends), maybe 5 minutes using Android phones, and probably 3-5 minutes using an iPad 1. So I can’t speak from the angle of other products may be bad because of X, or WebOS is better than Y, because well I haven’t used them, and really have no plans to.

But what I can say is the Touchpad has actually exceeded my general expectations for the device, being a day 1 adopter (I think this is the first time I’ve ever bought something the day of it’s release normally I wait a few months at least). The reviews around the net were by no means very positive, so that kind of got my hopes down in the last couple days leading up to the release.

It’s a pretty snappy tablet, audio works really well, good web browser, has integrated skype (integrated so well I spent about 15 minutes trying to find the ‘skype’ app only to figure out it’s built into the messaging application). It also has the ability to integrate several different sources into your contacts, for me that is LinkedIn and Skype (it supports many others but I don’t use them). It’s really neat to see all of the contacts integrated in one place, if there are duplicates(different names from different sources) it handles them seamlessly.

Since I already had a Palm profile from my Pre, I re-used that and the Touchpad automatically synced all of the compatible applications from my phone (which is now retired because it’s on it’s deathbed) to the tablet. I had heard that some apps would be capable of “scaling up” to the higher resolution and others would run in a sort of emulation mode with a mini phone on the screen. To my surprise the apps that scaled up were the more complex games, rather than the simple applications. I was expecting the other way around.

I bought a bunch of apps and games in the HP app store to screw around with, also synced a bunch of music, photos and video to it to try out.

The media sync is where I ran into my first real issue IMO, but fortunately I believe I have figured a workaround (which is prompting this post in case it helps someone else).

I am using an Ubuntu Laptop as my source computer, so I don’t have a Mac or Windows system to test this with. The behavior that I see though is that there is a built in indexing system on WebOS that gives data to the local Palm-specific apps such as the Photos app and the Music app. I copied all of my MP3s over to the Touchpad, and the Music app saw nothing. I copied several hundred pictures over and the pictures app saw nothing. I rebooted the Touchpad just in case, nothing. I was doing the same process as I did on my Palm Pre which worked every time.

I ended up engaging support (there is a nice live chat on the touchpad itself), and chatted with them for about an hour or so, and didn’t really get anywhere. Then I saw a different behavior (I wasn’t doing anything different) when I unplugged the Touchpad from my laptop. Rather than gracefully going back to the main screen it paused for a while and said “OWW! That hurts! Next time please unmount the drive from the desktop.” or something like that before returning to the main screen. At that point the music and pictures started showing up (took a while to index it all).

That “OWW!” screen repeated several times during testing last night even though every time I sync’d the file system buffers and unmounted the volume before unplugging like I do with any USB device (I know sync’ing is done automatically during umount I do it out of habit).

This morning I copied over a couple thousand more pictures, and when I unplugged, I didn’t get that screen, and I didn’t get any new pictures showing up in the application. So what I ended up doing was plugging it in again, syncing the file system buffers and then unplugging it while it was still mounted, this caused the “OWW!” screen and then triggered the indexer – my pictures showed up.

It’s gotta be a bug of some kind of course, I saw something similar from a reviewer on PreCentral.

One thing I did look into was the VPN connectivity, since VPN support is built into the OS, I was eager to find out what kinds of VPNs were supported, and at this time at least only Cisco VPNs are supported. Though I plan to get something like OpenVPN installed to securely connect to my home network. Hopefully some of those web-based SSL VPNs work too.. I imagine with HP’s enterprise user base targets they will work to get as wide scale VPN support as possible.

Overall I’m quite happy with the device so far, it will be something fun to play around with. The only thing it is really lacking in my opinion (and I knew this going in) was a Mini/Micro SD slot for more storage. I can imagine it must be pretty trivial to have one on something this big. HP did make an agreement with some cloud company named box.net to give every Touchpad owner 50GB of free cloud storage for the duration you have a box.net account. My question is what would cause someone to lose a box.net account, I mean if your not paying for it how could you get to a point where you don’t have one?

Speaking of cloud I will be getting out of the cloud soon, I bought a more up to date server and just got it installed at a new co-location in the Bay Area. I was thinking again about off site backups, and looking at how much it would cost to back up 1.5TB to the “cloud” convinced me to go it alone once again, my new server has more than 3TB usable space with ESXi, and I will migrate everything to it in early August. I need to take it off line for a couple of days to do my initial sync, 1.5TB over a consumer broadband link is just not reasonable. Will write more about that project later.

Like pretty much all WebOS devices in order to get access to the underlying Linux OS there is no jail breaking, no hacking, no exploiting security holes, just type a simple code to enable developer mode, install some software on your computer (compatible with Linux, Mac, Windows) and type a command and you have a root shell.

One thing that I haven’t found yet that would be handy is a terminal application. I had one on my Pre a long time ago, not sure what it was called, didn’t find any on the Preware homebrew site, though I did install bash, and OpenSSH(client and server).

nate@nate-laptop:~$ novaterm
Spaz / # uname -a
Linux Spaz 2.6.35-palm-tenderloin #1 SMP PREEMPT 129.1.17 armv7l GNU/Linux
Spaz / # free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        941916     508700     433216          0      24496     141132
-/+ buffers/cache:     343072     598844
Swap:       524284          0     524284
Spaz / #

Some screen shots

Another tip: to reduce the default logging from debug to normal – use the phone application and call ##LOGS#, from that screen you can individually adjust logging levels for each application, looks very syslog-like.

Looking forward to the over the air updates HP says is coming soon to address some/many of the current software bugs with the device, I can’t help but think the launch Touchpads have probably not had software updates in 2-3 weeks since they started manufacturing them.

Looking forward to the Pre 3 as well, it will integrate with the Touchpad so you can do things like SMS, send/receive calls from the Touchpad through the Pre transparently via Bluetooth. What would be even cooler is if the Pre was able to share it’s GPS information with the Touchpad, since the Wifi-only version lacks a GPS. There is also the touch to share functionality which can transfer web urls between the Pre 3 and the Touchpad by touching them together.

True multitasking is nice as well, which has been native on WebOS since it’s inception. Since I so rarely touch the other platforms out there I keep forgetting that so few of them offer multitasking.

There is also a $50 mail in rebate for previous Palm Pre/Pixi owners, apparently all you need is a serial# from the original device, don’t need a receipt. Offer good until the end of July.

I’ve only been using it for a short time of course, but so far I like what I see, and still believe there are good things coming for WebOS. Especially given the situations that Nokia and RIM (especially RIM) seem to be in, there is a good opportunity for HP to capitalize on RIM’s scrambling to get their QNX stuff out the door, time will tell if they are able to execute or not and the level of commitment they have to the WebOS platform longer term. The smart phone, and tablet markets still have a tiny amount of market penetration, so it’s really a long term strategy.

I give it a thumbs up, though suggest if you are a particularly picky and impatient person and want to try the Touchpad, given what I’ve read on other reviews you may want to wait a month or two for first couple software updates to be released.

If your on the fence, and have the cash, go get it, you can always return it if it doesn’t work out. I bought mine at Best Buy and they seem to have a 14 day no questions asked return policy(not that I expect to return it).

April 26, 2011

Misleading 3PAR

Filed under: Storage — Tags: , — Nate @ 8:43 am

Hello to my two readers out there!

You know I like 3PAR, have been using them for years, and know their stuff inside and out.

I was on a Computerworld article a few moments ago and saw an advertisement for 3PAR by HP and it made me cringe

While it is true that 3PAR has Intel Xeon processors, it’s really the custom built ASIC that does all the heavy lifting. General purpose CPUs don’t have a prayer in being able to keep up, much like general purpose CPUs don’t have a prayer in keeping up with high performance network switching fabrics.

I think the advertisement is bad, and misleading (by misleading I mean removing perceived value of the 3PAR platform by implying that Intel processors are the workhorse on the system). I’m sure that 3PAR would of never had made this mistake on their own. Someone at HP needs to be educated on the platform.

So I have to knock HP on that one.

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