F5 and HP Networking

Yesterday we had a meeting with f5 guys at HP’s office at Stockholm. HP is now investing a lot on Networking and trying to dominate the enterprise networking market. While at the same time F5 helps organizations create an agile IT infrastructure that aligns with their business demands.

They demonstrated what f5 WAN Optimization might be able to do for international companies.  Just like most IT organizations with multiple locations connected by WANs, networks are stretched beyond where they should be, and they  suffer from latency issues.  The result is poor user performance for the kind of applications (Exchange, SharePoint, SAP etc.) that run in nearly every enterprise.

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What to think about when buying a support contract?

You, for sure, bought maintenance contracts for your network products. But, have you ever tempted to change your product choice once you discovered that the support and maintenance (hardware support/tech support I mean) are not up to your requirements? What you should think about buying a support contract is all about knowing how fast and good can your vendor provide your support and what will be the response, repair times and the deliverables. Otherwise it is so easy to “trick” the customers by vendors.

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From Virtualization to Cloud Computing

It has been almost a year since we had an internal meeting at HP Stockholm to discuss virtualization and cloud computing. Nowadays we see some analyst firms, IT experts talking about the similar stuff and delivering the same message as we did in the past; Virtualization is an overall catalyst to IT modernization and change and should be taken seriously. In addition to this, virtualization is one of the main roads heading into the Cloud Computing via Private Clouds.

Virtual machine penetration has increased 50% in the last year. Gartner believes that nearly 30% of all workloads running on x86 architecture servers are now running on virtual machines.

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HP Networking Switch Manageability

HP Networking switches fall into three different families: Unmanaged switches, Web-managed switches, and fully managed switches, better known as managed switches.

• Unmanaged switches offer the most basic functionality and are designed for small networks. They are plug and play: that is, the customer simply connects the switch into the network, and the switch begins to function without any setup or management required. Unmanaged switches provide basic Layer 2 switching and are not configurable.

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HP Certified Network Sales Consultant

I took a certification exam last week at Partner Summit and I passed the HP ProCurve Sales Consultant test. I will share some course notes and tips soon. As a starting point, you can have a look at these sites:

– Exam details and Sample Questions

HP Networking (E-Series products mainly) products and services offer a variety of solutions to meet the needs of enterprises both large and small for security, mobility, and convergent network services such as Voice over IP (VoIP). In the Selling HP E-Series Networking Solutions Accredited Sales Consultant course, sales professionals learn how to assess customers’ needs and to design the best solution to meet these needs. They also discover the unique benefits delivered by each HP E-Series solution. You can use HP2-Z16-Study-Guide set to get ready for the exam. I got 82% and passed the final test by using the document. So, good luck to all of you.



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Cloud Computing Infrastructure

I had a presentation last week at HP Partner Summit at Stocholm about Cloud Computing Infrastructure and HP’s Trilogy offer. Well, trilogy in a basic is the infrastructure to build your private clouds on it. We beieve that after more than a decade of physical server sprawl, massive growth in storage requirements and the emergence of hierarchical network architectures, IT complexity has reached an all-time high.  Today, IT organizations are forced to act as their own systems integrators whereelse we think “there are not any IT project in the world; there are only business projects which need a lot of IT support”. Thats why we believe in business-ready infrastructures, which are converged and virtualized.

With the sprawl in IT systems, many customers find themselves with a complex and inflexible set of infrastructure that limits their ability to respond to changes in the business. For many, the goal of offering “IT as a service” remains elusive, and their legacy infrastructure is an increasingly larger part of their IT maintenance budget that constrains the ability of IT departments to launch new projects and innovate. Trilogy is, at this point, a great option to consider. Just have a look at to my presentation below and feel free to comment.

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Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is the hottest topic to talk about these days between IT people. Some really flatter the words while at the same time some others are a bit gun shy to talk about it. Cloud computing has been seen as a “golden bullet” to use/manage IT. Will it really help IT to be the “GPS of Business”. Are we really there now? As a young IT professional, I decided to give it a try to explain what I personally believe.

I would like to divide the phase into three main group as; Virtualization, Private Clouds (Internal Clouds), Public Clouds. It all started by virtualization of x86 machines. In today’s distributed environments, where up to 85 percent of computing capacity sits idle, there is a tremendous amount of waste, waste that companies no longer can afford. Maintaining current IT infrastructure sucks up about 70 percent of today’s IT budgets while new solutions and capabilities go begging. So, there was a big utilization problem and virtualization solved it successfully. Now, it is a main stream approach and has been already applied by a big portion of the enterprises. The ability to consolidate large server farms and better utilize hardware is a proven route to significant cost savings, and may also assist with corporate green initiatives in reducing CO2 emissions.

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Storage Virtualization and Deduplication

I have been involved in some Storage projects at HP these days and started to get my foots wet. I can not say I am a real professional on storage virtualization yet, but slowly surely I am emerging. Since I like to share my knowledge, I decided to write this blog post about storage virtualization.

Storage today is typically 10-15 percent of a typical IT budget, but it is only purchasing costs included. To sum it, we need to add personnel costs of operating, support and maintenance and the electricity and cooling costs as well. It obviously varies between different companies, but it is estimated amount of purchases of hardware and software and service on this for about 20-50 percent of the total cost. While the data center power and cooling account for 10-20 percent. Operation and management costs is therefore of 30-50 percent. So, the biggest area to save money is management and administaration areas, where many repetitive data should be automated (Storage Deduplication). Review your processes! Being able to free up staff for other tasks of course leads to cost savings.

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Storage as a Service

The traditional business model for acquiring storage capacity is challenged by today’s business realities. Utility Ready Storage solution is designed for organizations that require greater flexibility in IT resources because of variable and uncertain business demands and that want IT costs to reflect the business value delivered. Utility Ready Storage integrates products and services, to deliver IT resources when they are needed, where they are needed, with payment based on usage. As an example Storage as a Service options are quite suitabe for non-critical data.

One of the biggest providers of this type of services is HP. The HP Utility Ready Storage program is a utility pricing solution that allows you to select the storage configuration and software appropriate for you and pay monthly based on the amount of storage capacity configured for use. HP utility ready storage helps you to cut costs and free up your resource for innovation and savings.  In addition to these benefits, by using HP’s Utility Ready Storage offerings one can start up a company to sell Storage as a Service (STaaS).

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