The first vendor we visited was HP. First up was Jay Mellman and this was the marketing presentation which was well done. Jay talked about what the 3Com acquisition did for HP by brining in the high end switching from the H3C portfolio. Going into this I did not realize just how high end the HP switch line had grown. The 12518 is a big data center switch that directly completes with the Nexus 7018.
Jay (pictured) also talked about where HP sees the data center in 2010. Their vision is a standards based DC focusing on service delivery. I agree with this vision as companies are going to be more concerned with are the key business services up and running not what it is running on. HP feels, as do I, that infrastructure will be converging into a single fabric. They also think they are in the unique position as they can be a one stop shop for all of your needs because they offer servers, storage and the network.
This led us to the next presentation and where things went downhill. We went to very nice looking showpiece room and this is where we thought we would start to get technical. We did not. In fact it was very non-technical. The presenter could not even answer basic questions like “What is the bandwidth per slot?” when talking about the 12518. His answer was “The good news is they sent the good looking guy” to explain why he is non-techncal. Yeah, that went over well. This was pretty much a waste of time. I had really hoped to get a good understanding of HP’s Intelligent Resilient Framework but we did so now it just sounds like a good idea but I still don’t know technical details.
After that we talked about the management software called Intelligent Management Center which sounded like a really nice management offering but price is going to eliminate most customers from buying it.
We wrapped up the visit with a discussion on Tipping Point which is a nice security product but again the presenter was more marketing then technical so not much to say here. When did the demo it was good but not a lot of depth. Looks to be a good product but security is not my strong point.
Summary
HP did not get the audience. Jay’s opening presentation is about all the marketing we wanted. We are a highly technical group but they sent no one technical. I like where HP is going on their products but have no idea if they are accomplishing their goals. Hopefully in the company weeks I can find the technical info I was looking for. However HP is clearly moving in the right direction and if your going to look at Cisco for servers you have to look at HP for networking in your data center.
