Hewlett-Packard just announced a new line of business computers. They include sensors in the racks and wires, and smart software. Perhaps it should also include a small prayer that its customers do not change too much or too fast.
The new machines, the ProLiant Generation 8 servers, are the product of two years of development costing $300 million. The company claims the machines have over 160 different upgrades and new features compared with H.P.'s previous generation of servers, including things like automated updating of security patches that can cut server re-provisioning times to 10 minutes from 5 hours. Sensors in the server racks can tell where machines are located and how they are performing. Performance tweaks yield 70 percent more computing power per watt, H.P. says. Fewer humans and more software, the company claims, can cut server downtime by up to 93 percent.
These are all changes that speak to the big concerns corporate buyers have about their growing computer systems: how can they keep track of things, afford the power demands, and keep this many densely packed semiconductors from melting down under the heat they collectively generate? H.P. is also selling how much these systems can save on manpower costs, with much of the maintenance automated. (The computers can even send care messages to H.P.'s resellers.)
Companies may be able to unload staff members, but H.P. hopes they keep the machines themselves. After all, H.P. is a company with over $130 billion in annual revenues, and a good portion of that comes from having its machines inside corporate data centers. If companies move to cloud systems, particularly clouds in which operators buy machines and equipment directly from cheaper suppliers like Flextronics, or Taiwan's Quanta, then H.P. has worries. Clouds are volume buys, meaning H.P. will have to compete at a lower profit margin.
Jim Ganthier, H.P.'s vice president for server marketing, said his company was confident there is still a long future ahead for computing on premises. "Ultimately, it will all be a hybrid," he said. Corporate tech buyers "are smart folks," he said. "They'll vote for the team that will help them best." In the long run, he said, the new line is also well-suited for cloud computing.
H.P. is not just looking to hold onto individual sales to business. The software that tells resellers, powerful sales allies for H.P., when they need to service computers will help those resellers persuade their customers to keep buying machines — and not move too fast to cloud computing. We'll see if that works.
This server upgrade, called Project Voyager, follows an announcement in November of Project Moonshot, which employs low-power cellphone chips to power servers in big data centers. (You don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that H.P. is naming all of its server programs after famous NASA programs.) A sales line announced in December, called Project Odyssey, allowed popular operating systems to be used in highly demanding computing situations.
Copyright: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/13/h-p-s-servers-are-a-play-against-the-cloud/