Hp on The IT Hollow

HP v1910-24G Switch Review

Tue, 03 Jun 2014 13:27:17 +0000

When my Cisco 3750 finally died, I was bummed out but looking for a replacement. No sense in crying about my loss, or trying to decide IF I’m going to replace my switch since, my whole lab would be kind of useless without it.

My requirements for a new switch were pretty simple.

Layer 3 Routing Capabilities
24 Gigabit Ports or better
Cheap

The HP v1910-24G (JE006A) seemed to meet my requirements so I ordered it from Amazon when I saw that it was under $300. I needed to get it in my lab fast, so I quickly made the purchase but I’ll admit I was skeptical. Timothy Carr eased my mind a bit when he tweeted me.

HP 9470m Laptop Review

Mon, 05 May 2014 14:54:18 +0000

I recently purchased the HP 9470m EliteBook and wanted to give it a quick review.

The Good

The laptop has a pretty slim design as you would expect from an EliteBook. Be aware however that this is not as slim as a Mac b ook Air, or the Samsung Series 9 laptops. The good news though is that you don’t need to use a dongle just to plug in an Ethernet cable. The same goes for having a VGA output which I often use for presentations. It can be a pain to hunt down a dongle to connect to a wired network, or a projector so I give this Elitebook points for that.

Add SSDs to HP Microserver

Wed, 11 Dec 2013 15:21:26 +0000

My brand new shiny HP Microserver arrived in the mail and I was excited to try it out. I had four 480GB OCZ SSDs to add to this baby server and wanted to get it up and running. Unfortunately, the HP Microserver is built for 3.5 inch drives. Luckily I found great solution.

Newer Technology AdaptaDrive 2.5" to 3.5" Drive Converter Bracket.

Attach your 2.5 inch SSD to this bracket, then attach the bracket to the HP MicroServer Drive Trays and you’re good to go.

HP OneView

Mon, 30 Sep 2013 13:43:43 +0000

Hewlett-Packard is unveiling a new product called HP OneView which is designed to give you a one stop shop to managing all of your data center management responsibilities.

If you’re familiar with the HP System Insight Management and Insight Control, you are probably aware of the difficult setup procedures required to get everything setup correctly and running smoothly. The products are really useful in having a single place to manage the data center, but the setup process is a bit tedious. My take on HP OneView is that it is a complete revamp of the HP SIM design which should be a welcomed site to those of you familiar with the old process.

HP StoreOnce VSA

Tue, 16 Jul 2013 14:08:08 +0000

HP announced a new virtual storage appliance (VSA) recently at their annual HP Discover conference. This is a virtual appliance based on the StoreOnce line (formerly known as D2D) of hardware appliances that HP has sold for a long time. These appliances have the catalyst software which allows for deduplication of all your backup data, hence the term StoreOnce.

These devices have allowed administrators to switch from the older tape based backups to a virtual tape library (VTL) or a NAS type backup solution. It has replication options in it which allow for deduplicated data to be migrated or copied without re-hydrating the backups and wasting valuable bandwidth. It also allows for federated backups and when matched with HP Data Protector 8 (also newly released) can throttle bandwidth during backup operations in order to prevent production slow downs.

SDR News Interview for HP Discover

Fri, 21 Jun 2013 14:28:40 +0000

I was recently interviewed by Andrew McCaskey from SDR News about the HP Discover conference. The interview is below

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=IUM-sDiHD18

New HP Business Desktops

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 14:26:28 +0000

Only a few years removed from when HP announced they were ditching the workstation part of their product line, they’ve announced a new set of desktops this week.

The EliteOne 800 G1

The EliteOne 800 G1 is an all in one solution for companies that include the newer Intel 8 Series Q85 chipset which includes the Intel vPro technology. I haven’t been able to get my hands on playing with this yet, but essentially it uses the trusted execution environment in order to allow access to the PC even if it’s powered off, or if it has a virus. Perhaps this doesn’t seem like a big deal to end users, but the IT group that has to support these devices will certainly take notice. I liken it to having an iLO processor on every desktop so that troubleshooting can be done remotely by support. This will even allow off site or third party support to gain access in order to troubleshoot issues.

HP Proliant MicroServer Gen8

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 13:27:10 +0000

HP has a new MicroServer out that would be perfect for the anyone who is looking for a solid home lab server. The Microserver G7 was a fairly popular server for home computing enthusiasts and HP decided to add upon that line.

The original reason for this server was for small businesses that wanted a small but stable server with features such as integrated Lights Out (iLO) but as it so happens, this line was pretty useful for those bloggers and certification junkies that wanted to take some HP Servers home with them.

New HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450 Announced

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 18:25:27 +0000

HP officially announced the new HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450 today to some oohs and ahhs at HP Discover.

The new 3PAR is an all flash array that can be utilized for small, medium or large business needs. HP is touting that some of their competitors are having difficulty with the flash hurdle because their systems were optimized for spinning disks. And other competitors who designed their arrays specifically with flash in mind from the ground up are not proven arrays from a reliability standpoint.

HP Virtual Connect Throughput

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 13:54:15 +0000

I want to address a concern that many HP Virtual Connect customers have had about monitoring their Blade Chassis. A question I’ve received was “How do I know if I have sufficient uplinks for my traffic?”

Depending on the size of the organization and their familiarity with their networking equipment, they could be monitoring the available metrics on their switches. If they are not necessarily that network savvy or don’t have the proper monitoring tools in place, they can use the throughput statistics tools within Virtual Connect. These tools only give a simplistic view to the amount of traffic that is going across your uplinks, and doesn’t show the traffic going out each blade but it does get you some great high level information.

New from HP: Project Moonshot

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 16:15:32 +0000

Today HP announced their new initiative called Project Moonshot.

This initiative takes converged infrastructure and puts it on steroids. Hewlett Packard identified that the amount of compute, power and cooling that is necessary to continue providing resources for Big Data, and mobile platforms is unsustainable at the current rate. It just isn’t feasible with the current technology to continue to throw the same servers into data centers without optimizing.

HP Performance Viewer

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 14:42:54 +0000

I decided to check out the new HP Performance Viewer and found it to be pretty useful. The appliance comes as an OVF so it’s great for importing into your vSphere environment. Once it’s installed you can go to the management URL and all you have to do is provide the name of the vCenter and login credentials. That’s all for the configuration!

At this point I’d give the appliance some time to gather statistics, but if you just can’t wait I’ll give you some of the details from my install.

HP Insight Remote Support

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 14:14:17 +0000

I used to love the fact that with my old Netapp FAS2040 that I’d get a phone call about replacing a failed drive almost before I received the alert about the drive in the first place. Phone home seemed genius to me and as it turns out, Hewlett Packard has this capability for their equipment.

Full disclosure: As many of you know, I currently work for an HP Partner so my advice may be a bit biased. I can tell you that I wouldn’t put a product on this site which I didn’t like so please don’t think that I’m just trying to push HP products. You may see more HP related articles from me, only because I encounter them more frequently than others.

HP 3PAR for midrange business

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 16:44:06 +0000

HP Enterprise class storage has just entered the mid range market. Today HP announced the HP 3PAR StoreServ 7000 class which includes two devices; the HP 3PAR 7200 and the HP 3PAR 7400. The 7200 starts at $25k for the 2U device and the 7400 (seen below) is less than $40K for a 4U device.

I’m very excited about this announcement because now HP has a storage device with the features that everybody wants and it’s now affordable for a smaller sized organization. HP has seemingly targeted one of it’s own devices with this announcement (the HP EVA) since it has been very popular with the mid-range business. They’ve even included some tools to migrate data from the EVA to the new 3PAR. I seriously doubt that the EVA will entirely go away, but the new big brother is going to steal some of their thunder.

HP Insight Control for vCenter

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 15:15:10 +0000

I recently tried out the HP Insight Control plugin for vCenter and was very pleased about the added functionality that was provided in my vSphere client.

http://h18013.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/integration.html

This plugin gives you additional control of your HP servers and storage that are being used by your vSphere environment. Like other storage vendors, the install will configure your VASA plugin, and will also allow you to do things such as create datastores and snapshots on the storage array from the vSphere Client.

HP Storage Comparisons (Sept. 2012)

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 12:00:26 +0000

I have been recently thrown into the world of HP Storage, and have been trying to learn all of the storage techniques that are in the HP product line. I noticed that I couldn’t find anything that really did a compare and contrast of each of the products so I started to put one together. Anything I couldn’t understand, I asked a great guy named Calvin Zito (@hpstorageguy) to give me a hand with. He was more than gracious so follow him on Twitter.

HP Gen8 Server Class Review

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 14:15:10 +0000

Hewlett-Packard has released the details of their new product line the Gen8 (don’t call me G8) servers. The new line as, you would expect, has all of the performance increases that seem necessary when coming out with a new product. The new Sandy Bridge XEON processors are onboard, they’ve increased the number of DIMM slots, increased the total amount of memory allowed per system while also increasing the memory speed supported. HP has also switched over to PCI 3.0 which is providing much faster speeds for PCI devices.