The meeting to evaluate HP’s On-Demand offers
Taking advantage of the opportunities born from VMworld 2008 in Cannes while we visited the HP booth and talked about storage and blade systems with the very kind
- Kyle Fitze – Director, Product Marketing Storage Area Networks StorageWorks Division
- Barry Sinclair – Hp BladeSystem Platform Marketing Infrastructure Product Manager
we have climbed all the commercial grades of HP USA and EMEA.
- Shawn A. Wagner – WW Utility Ready Storage Program Manager Business Development Team
- Jason Wildt – EMEA Program Manager
- Marco Spoldi – Business Development Manager StorageWorks Division – Chairman of SNIA Europe Italy
- Fabrizio Zazzeri – HP Storage Services
- Antonio Rolli – ISS Product Marketing Manager
Through a series of emails we were put in touch and contacted by HP Milan sales and we made an appointment at HP headquarters in Milan to evaluate the offers and opportunities of HP onDemand services.
In the meeting, which lasted several hours, with Fabrizio Zazzeri, we explored and understood the commercial offers of onDemand solutions called:
URS – Utility Ready Storage
USS – Utility Sourcing Services
The URS is an onDemand service oriented only to the physical space of the data, the concept behind it is to have an excellent hardware in house owned by HP, controlled in everything directly by HP, with a percentage of disk space always available. HP monitors the state of use of space and intervenes physically and autonomously to add disks or for hardware interventions. Therefore, there are fixed costs and variable costs, the fixed costs are related to HP’s administration, monitoring and billing activities. The variable costs are related to the GB of space used.
The USS is a solution that is always onDemand but oriented towards a complete infrastructure,
in the sense of servers, networking and storage and pre-packaged software solutions (e.g. SAP, EXCHANGE, DYNAMICS). Here too the concept is linked to fixed costs and variable costs.
Unfortunately, both solutions are only excellent for large companies, generally for internal use; The fixed costs are comparable to the purchase of the material.
We then focused on normal commercial offers of leasing or purchase and drew up a list of the minimum material needed. In this specific case, we evaluated the following material:
Storage : EVA4100 starter kit (2 controllers, 1 enclosure, 8 disks)
Blade Enclosure : BladeSystem c-Class c7000 Enclosure with Virtual Connect Ethernet opt kit and Virtual Connect FC opt kit
Server Blade : BL480c blade with fiber and ethernet connectivity 48 GB 2 CPUs, or BL460c fiber and ethernet connectivity 32 GB 2 CPUs, with integrated ESX3i hypervisor
Afterwards we had a nice and stimulating chat with Antonio Rolli who then provided us with detailed estimates of the Blade hardware and assured us large percentages of discount.
Unfortunately, the logic of the blades, very fascinating, very useful with considerable advantages at all levels, energy consumption, redundancy, internal connectivity, etc., constitutes for a company that was born with the logic of always having to grow. A continuous investment in steps, as the percentage weight of the blade enclosure on the total cost (full blade system) is about 25%.
Furthermore, it is not possible for us to take advantage of leasing as the financial company requires a minimum of three years of deposited assets.
Therefore the interesting offers and opportunities received will be carefully considered.
