HP Discover’s Big Storage Announcement and Prize Giveaways
I’ve made it a point to attend every HP Discover conference I’ve been invited to as they always manage to provide a tremendous amount of technical information for me to ponder, discuss, and write about (Disclaimer: HP provides for my travel and registration). At the Las Vegas conference, for example, I covered some key improvements to the HP Smart Update Manager 5 application, including how to update a BladeSystem c7000 chassis, along with working with the HP ExpertONE to partake in their certification experience. This year holds true to that pattern as I gear up for the information extravaganza that is being prepared in Frankfurt, Germany for the EMEA edition of HP’s Discover conference. However, there’s a bit of a twist with this go around.
For HP Discover in Frankfurt, HP has been letting some excitement build up around a surprise storage announcement. The landing page includes a series of short videos in which questions are asked from the perspective of how we arrived at our current technology, planning for disaster recovery, and file based storage. A number of “timelines” build in reverse to show the decisions that face those who are managers and administrators within an IT environment.
There really isn’t any meat on the landing page yet, but I would imagine this is due to the desire to have a surprise reveal at the conference when David Scott (SVP and GM, HP Storage) gives his presentation on December 4th. In the meanwhile, I’ve got some suggestions below for those who wish to join in the conversation and stay current with the developing updates.
Staying Current
If you want to engage further on the topic, I suggest the content created by fellow vExpert Calvin Zito (@HPStorageGuy on Twitter). While he is quite passionate about HP Storage, he’s also a very straight shooter and good friend of the virtualization community.
Visit his Around the Storage Block blog or join the HP Storage LinkedIn group that he manages and moderates. Some of his recent topics include:
- Your biggest challenges with information retention and analytics (free t-shirt for comments)
- Excursions to enjoy on your visit to Frankfurt for HP Discover 2012, plus travel visa update (some really neat places to see!)
- Are you coming to Frankfurt – what to see
Calvin also travels around with a case of Idaho Spuds to hand out. Which is awesome.
So weird looking and tasty!
And The Prize Giveaways?
As a way to further engage with you, the awesome reader that you are, I have some prize giveaways that you can enter to win!
Winners receive both of these items: HP ENVY 14-3010NR Spectre 14-Inch Ultrabook and HP Storage RDX Removable Disk Backup System.
I really wish I had one of these 
And as an added bonus, I get to come up with whatever method I want in order to hand out the entries. Let the nefarious plans begin!
How To Win
It’s rather simple. The spirit of this prize giveaway is to encourage engagement with the HP Discover community and increase visibility of the upcoming storage announcement at Frankfurt. As such, I’ll make it easy to share and enjoy.
Option 1 - Leave a comment below with a brief narrative of how HP impacts you
Make sure to fill in the E-mail address box when you post a comment or include your Twitter Handle in the comment. The E-mail address is private and can only be seen by me.
Some ideas -
- How do you leverage HP products now?
- If you’ve been to or plan to visit HP Discover, what did you learn or enjoy?
- Any HP success stories over unique challenges you want to share?
- Bonus kudos from me if you include any links to a photo of you with an HP server / blade / switch / laptop / whatever!
Option 2 – Use the “Tweet” button below to share this post on Twitter
This option is easy – you just have to click a button. If you include the #HPStorage hashtag, HP might even retweet you! Feel free to add your own flavor to the tweet.
Rules
- Four (4) names will be drawn by me on Friday, November 23rd and submitted to HP for the first round of four (4) prizes. Winners will be announced the following week.
- Another four (4) names will be drawn by me on Friday, November 30th and submitted to HP for the second round of four (4) prizes. Winners will be announced the following week.
- You can only win once.
- No guarantee you will win as other sources are also participating and submitting names for the four (4) prizes.
- Blog Comment entries must include an E-mail address or Twitter handle to be eligible.
- Prizes are handled by HP and will be fulfilled after HP Discover in December.
Week One Winners
- 1Cloud Road – Craig Janzen
- Wahl Network – Josh Testone (congrats!)
- GeekZone – Luke Wilkins
- Juku.it – Pietro Piutti
Week Two Winners
- Wahl Network – Stephanie G (another congrats!)
- Other people (I don’t have their names)
My previous employer was an HP shop and my current employer is a Dell shop. To be completely honest, the current impact HP has on me is not a good one since my home lab server is an HP DL360 G3 and is hardly compatible with anything. On the bright side, the rig you are giving away would make a nice virtualization environment using VM Workstation.
I use a few HP products for my work lab environment. Storage is provided by an HP P2000 G3 MSA array (fibre channel!), whilst the compute is handled by a C7000 blade chassis (recently upgraded from a C3000) – that was a heavy lift! The C7000 is not completely populated yet, but the 7 or 8 blades in there are doing a sterling job, and the storage is super fast for VM provisioning (VAAI support). Must say I am quite happy with this environment. Pics or GTFO? Here is the P2000 and the C7000 chassis with blades – https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1230453/HPlabkit/photo.JPG & https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1230453/HPlabkit/photo1.JPG
Haha, love the “Pics or GTFO” part. Awesome. And yes, the c7000 weighs quite a bit but at least the midplane can be extracted from it prior to movement (unlike some other vendor chassis).
Currently using an EVA 4400 with 8 enclosures at 2 sites. Been good to us but now looking for a refresh. Can’t wait to see what HP Storage has in store.
HP creates the products that we most turn to when it comes to getting down to business and feel most comfortable using at this time. Being that we have young children, it’s what they’re growing up with and therefore what they are familiar with, much like myself growing up. When my hubby was looking for a solution in a laptop that could provide the speed he needed when ustreaming, he bought a competitor’s brand, but shortly after returned it because he found an HP with specs that were more desirable and fit his needs better. HP just offers the solutions we need to handle our simple and even sometimes complex computer needs.
Forgot to mention that I tweeted as well: https://twitter.com/mommasreviews/status/270746391620509697
The HP approach of building IT solutions for global community through internal innovations and timely acquisition simply makes HP the best player in providing the right and innovative products/solutions. The acquisition of 3PAR, Autonomy is the best example on how HP positioned itself in becoming the top player in the space of storgae/cloud solutions.
Only this year did we decommission our HP Compaq MSA8000 & our BL20p G2/G3 blades. The MSA8000 was still going when the EVA4400 it was replaced with, was replaced itself with an EVA8400.
Budgets aren’t kind to the IT department here, so just as well the HP/Compaq gear runs for a long time.
Here’s the MSA8000 http://dl.dropbox.com/u/54246150/IMG_3743.JPG
HP makes some awesome enterprise hardware. Looking forward to whatever they announce.
I’ve spent many nights in datacenters and the Proliants were always there to keep me company
I must admit the ProLiants keeping you company part gave me a good chuckle.
Hey Chris – thanks for defending the Idaho Spuds! I’ll be sure to bring a stash to Frankfurt (though I do think the German chocolates are better). And thanks for the kind words and links to my blog!
Andrew – love hearing stories like yours. I had an Australian channel partner send me pictures of a Gen 1 ProLiant that their customer had just retired. Ended up doing a blog post about it and the number of customers who left comments like “only had to replace a fan” or the like was amazing.
Chuckflarhu – I’ve been with HP since 1983 and have been involved with storage the whole time, actually moving into HP Storage in 1990. I’ve never been more excited about what we’ll be announcing than now. I can truly say that we we have will live up to the hype. If you aren’t coming to HP Discover, be sure to register for the announcement on our website. Chris has a link to it in his blog post where his text says, “surprise storage announcement”.
If I look back at my past years in IT, I can only think HP. I used to be the server guy at my previous employer. Started with DL380 G2s and ended up running an enterprise vSphere environment on the very latest C7000s blade enclosures! Now I’m doing something else, but I’m coming to Discover and I’m looking forward to check where HP is these days!
HP has been my preferred vendor for many years. The server platform is so reliable and the support fantastic.
HP has really impressed me over the last 24 months. I did some datacenter management design work about 5 years ago with all Dell products and then got out of the industry for 3 years. When I came back, starting a new job, I inherited about 25 dell servers and about 40 G4p-G7 Proliant servers. My first personal goal was to dump all the HPs and go with more dells but once seeing the incredible strides HP had made, I am a fan. We currently have about 45 G6-G7 HPs connected to a Isilon X200 system and I could not be more happy with the results. We virtualized about 900 VMs at the moment, and “everything” feels like it is running on its own SSD drive.
TL;DR – HP really stepped up its game and I will not buy anything else.
I’ll post the names of the 4 folks that will be submitted for this week’s set of prizes on Saturday (Nov 24).
I don’t utilise any HP storage right now but I cant wait to see what HP has up it’s sleeves! At the moment the only HP product I use is an HP Pavilion desktop. It’s a great product and has lasted me many years now.
Thanks for all the social activity this past week. I’ve especially enjoyed the photos and humorous comments.
Using a PowerShell randomizer script, the first week of finalists are:
1 = Pietro Piutti
2 = Eric Shanks
3 = Josh
4 = Rob Markovic
I’ve submitted your info to HP for the prize drawing – if you win, they will contact you to confirm. As soon as I have information on who has won I will post an update here. Everyone who doesn’t end up winning is still eligible to be a finalist next week.
Very excited about this! Thanks for taking the time to put this together.
I have an HP Pavillion desktop computer. I love HP. I have owned several products, and am currently getting ready to use HP products for my small business of consulting. On a side note, My 5 year old daughter tells people she has “HEP” because she is learning to read and doesn’t know it is “H” “P”…haha…She tells everyone that.
Personally I love up, from there Proliant virtual hosts to there consumer products (I have touchsmart all in one, dv6 laptop, and touchpad) seems like their products are better cared for than other PC makers. I plan on visting the HP Discover to find more out their upcoming products
Week one winners have been announced by HP – I’ve included them at the bottom of the post. A special congrats to Josh Testone for winning based on an entry on this site!
Next week’s finalists will be selected Saturday (Dec 1) morning and posted to the comments again. Good luck and make sure to spread the word!
Woo Hoo! Thanks again for the great insight into VMware/HP products and this wonderful opportunity.
Tweeted your article out to my peeps 11.28.12 5:55 p.m. Thanks for all you do!
The second week finalists!
Sean Duffy
Matt Lattanzio
Tony Coffman
Stephanie G
I’ve submitted your info to HP for the prize drawing – if you win, they will contact you to confirm. As soon as I have information on who has won I will post an update here. This is the last week – thank you all for participating!
Hi,
HP products are my favorites. I built a big server room on my first job about 10 years ago. That was a big 6 millions project. Spent nights configuring all servers and storage appliances. Second job we got couple HP workstations for sysadmins… Nice, powerful and very quiet hardware…
Third job in love of HP stable hardware I upgraded company’s server room to everything from HP. To be honest.. wasn’t easy to get a budget for that, but I’m proud of myself. They never have troubles since upgrade =)
Now I have my personal laptop HP ElliteBook with a 3G modem inside and I can manage my server room remotely drinking coffee at Starbucks or in train. And it’s so easy… Why do I need to go to work if I manage HP products remotely?… Good idea to ask my boss for this opportunity =)
A bit late here, I know, but I just got the name of the winner for the second week. Congrats to Stephanie G!