HP v1910-24G Switch Review

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. ...

June 3, 2014 · 3 min · eshanks

HP v1910-24G CLI Goody

theITHollow.com lab suffered an outage to the core switch a few weeks ago (an aging Cisco 3750) and I was looking for a replacement that wouldn’t break the bank. Luckily I found the HP v1910-24G (JE006A) to be more than adequate. One of my main gripes with this switch was that the Command Line Interface was very limited. See for yourself. While the cli out of the box is nice, and I would say necessary, there isn’t a lot that can be done with it. For basic configuration tasks, you’ll be stuck with the Web GUI. But after digging through some HP discussion boards I found out that you can enable the Comware operating system commands. ...

May 27, 2014 · 2 min · eshanks

HP 9470m Laptop Review

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. ...

May 5, 2014 · 4 min · eshanks

Add SSDs to HP Microserver

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. ...

December 11, 2013 · 1 min · eshanks

HP StoreOnce VSA

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. ...

July 16, 2013 · 3 min · eshanks

SDR News Interview for HP Discover

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

June 21, 2013 · 1 min · eshanks

New HP Business Desktops

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. ...

June 13, 2013 · 3 min · eshanks

HP Proliant MicroServer Gen8

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. ...

June 12, 2013 · 2 min · eshanks

New HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450 Announced

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. ...

June 11, 2013 · 2 min · eshanks

HP Virtual Connect Throughput

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. ...

June 5, 2013 · 2 min · eshanks