Cisco’s Rip and Replace Dilemma « Wikibon Blog
Cisco’s newer Nexus family are non-blocking switches, but even if companies have made the investment in Nexus, they will need to spend more money and re-architect their environments if they add FabricPath when it is available in Q3 ‘10. Both Juniper – with its Project Stratus and “3-2-1″ data center architecture – and HP (3Com) – with its Intelligent Resilient Framework (IRF) – have alternatives that companies should evaluate when making the move to a 10GbE next generation of switches and architecture. Cisco, HP and Juniper have dramatically different approaches to architecting nextgen networks. In short, Cisco wants to maintain its substantial lock-in advantage, HP wants to bomb pricing and Juniper wants to disrupt everything so it can steal share. Customers should understand that no matter which path they choose for virtualizing networks, they must plan for disruption and look toward developer-friendly, multi-vendor, best-of-breed solutions to minimize lock-in.
Will you Rip and Replace your Cisco network?
Surprise! HP Reveals Plans for WebOS Tablet - PCWorld Business Center
Following a grandiose unveiling of the Windows 7-based Slate by Microsoft and HP at CES earlier this year, HP continued to hype the advantages of the tablet over the impending Apple iPad. However, some poor initial reviews of the Slate prototype, and the flawed logic of trying to compete with the iPad by cramming a desktop into a tablet form factor led HP to pull the plug.
HP instead acquired the flailing Palm, and with it the very capable WebOS mobile platform. Rumors immediately began to circulate that the Slate would be reborn as a WebOS tablet. Now, those predictions are coming true as HP plans to revive WebOS from the ashes and use it as the foundation for tablets, smartphones, and other mobile computing devices.
From an enterprise perspective, the HP tablet may make more sense than the Apple iPad. Like its Windows 7-based predecessor, the HP WebOS tablet is expected to have most of the features and functionality missing from the iPad. A tablet built on a mobile OS, but including USB or SD memory card ports, front and/or rear facing cameras, and compatibility with Adobe Flash content offers business professionals a number of compelling reasons to shun the iPad.
While it is not Windows, HP's close relationship with Microsoft may lead it to integrate WebOS more tightly with Microsoft server and desktop applications and services. With HP's backing, WebOS could emerge as the mobile OS that Windows Mobile--or now Windows Phone 7--should be.
Arguably, Microsoft missed a prime opportunity in not purchasing Palm itself. While Microsoft enjoys a comfortable dominance in many markets, its efforts to capture the mobile market have floundered. While its not a business device, the very quick and abrupt failure of the Kin, followed by Microsoft pulling the plug on the Sidekick, illustrate the steep hill Microsoft has yet to climb.
Windows Phone 7 seems to hold some promise, but the repeated delays and launching in the wake of iPhone 4 and a whole slew of exceptionally capable Android-based smartphones like the Droid X put Windows Phone 7 behind the proverbial 8-ball before it even hits the streets.
Although Palm was in free fall, its WebOS platform is very capable and has been praised by both industry experts and users. With Microsoft's marketing muscle and distribution channels, it could have taken WebOS and built a mobile empire on it.
Instead, Microsoft continues to struggle to adapt to the evolving mobile computing market, and now it has a new competitor to deal with in HP and WebOS.
You can follow Tony on his Facebook page , or contact him by email at tony_bradley@pcworld.com . He also tweets as @Tony_BradleyPCW .
HP has officially completed the acquisition of Palm, making it the proud owner of Palm's coveted intellectual property including WebOS. It is hardly a surprise that before the ink was even dry on finalizing the purchase, HP announced its intent to build an array of mobile devices around the WebOS platform--including the predicted WebOS tablet.
Steve Wozniak Hangs Out With HP Again
Once upon Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak worked at another well-known hardware maker. Seasoned veterans of Woz-lore will know he had an earlier career stint at Hewlett-Packard. That’s why Wozniak is part of a new campaign featuring Fusion-io products and HP as the OEM partner. Here’s the scoop…
In February 2009, Steve Wozniak teamed up with Fusion-io. As ‘chief scientist’ there, Wozniak helped design Fusion-io’s claim to fame, which is advanced data storage featuring solid state storage. According to the video interview on HP’s promotional website, Wozniak gushes about his time working at HP and was excited to hear that Fusion-io had some OEM partners, including HP. The most notable quote coming from Wozniak, however, wasn’t about Fusion-io. It was about the good old days at HP…
“I swear to God, the morale we had there [at HP] — we never got that good of morale at Apple.”
HP’s new announcement involves their HP IO Accelerators with the aforementioned Fusion-io technology in them. HP is using the technology to boost blade storage, speed and eliminate application bottlenecks. And Wozniak had one important thing to say about that…
“I want Hewlett-Packard to be the prime company associated with that [technology]“
So, on June 22nd, HP will kick off the announcement and Steve Wozniak will be there since it’s been dubbed “Woz’s launch party.” If you want the nitty gritty about the Fusion-io /HP component, you can check it out here.
VARs working in the virtualization and storage market might be interested. But for the rest of the world, it’s an amusing dichotomy to view Wozniak’s current focus vs. that of his former business partner, Steve Jobs.
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HP Slate: First Look at New Tablet
The HP Slate — Hewlett-Packard’s answer to Apple’s iPad tablet — has made it into the wild. There isn’t too much back story, but basically, a Mexican website named Conecti.ca got hold of an HP Slate before the rest of us and gave it a look over. Here’s the full story…
The verdict from Conecti.ca? “Meh” — the internet colloquialism used frequently in English to describe general disinterest or apathy.
We’ve already discussed the details of the device, so we’ll cut to the bottom line.
Conecti.ca says they only had the device for a short amount of time, but Google Translate quotes them as saying “the problem [is that it's] a whole PC.” The general feeling was that, in response as an iPad killer, the Slate is not.
The article states “You have Flash, but unfortunately this means you have a long and annoying load time…” and state that the only device that will be competing against it is other netbooks, not tablets.
It comes with a fancy HDMI / USB dock for your enjoyment, along with an apparently brighter screen than the iPad. Plus it includes a custom media management suite. The plastic design feels “dense and tough,” though the review concludes that Slate is the “smallest complete netbook” they could find.
Despite all the general malaise regarding the product, Gizmodo seems upbeat, noting that “it’s way too early to dismiss its chances against the iPad and its upcoming wave of challengers.” They also dismissed the ‘netbook without a keyboard’ observation with “well…yeah…[duh].”
On paper, there’s a lot of devices that are ‘technically superior’ to the iPad, iPhone, etc… but if they don’t do something spectacular or offer something different, unique, easy etc… the way Apple does, then it doesn’t stack up.
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Could it challenge the iPad? Not in my opinion. It still winmo!
iPad VS HP Slate: Price Wars
Engadget has what looks like to be an internal slide for HP employees regarding the Slate, pricing, strategy and a side-by-side comparison of the iPad. Is it a fair match? Is it a match at all? Just how does the Slate stack up against Steve Job’s brain child? Read on…
To be fair, the comparisons of the iPad VS the Slate aren’t comparing Apples to Apples, because the experience on both devices isn’t the same. But HP’s leaked memo seems less concerned about the experience, and more concerned about the hardware. It details the iPad and the Slate side by side with a list of hardware components. Red highlights indicate the iPad’s advantage, while green highlights indicate the Slate’s advantage. The only things — acording to HP — that the iPad has on the Slate is battery life, wireless N support, a slightly larger resolution screen, and — what’s this? Price.
That’s right. The Slate is priced at $549 for the 32GB flash storage version or $599 if you want a 64GB version. The Slate’s winnings? HP sees a media card reader, a camera, expandable storage via a media card reader, and HDMI out with 1080p as winners against the iPad. (I suppose you can lump in that $549 gets you double the data for $50 bucks, versus the $100 difference between a 32GB and 16GB iPad.)
Just to be fair, the iPad has video out, just not 1080p via HDMI. You can get 720p via component. There isn’t a camera, or expandable storage, so obviously HP can tout these features exclusively. But the real difference when you boil it down is the user experience. And the HP Slate will include Windows 7 Home Premium, complete with a stylus.
So will that mean you’ll just have a sleek device with a clunky Windows experience? Well, the leaked slide contains a reference to an “HP touch-optimized UI,” so maybe the boys at HP have been working on a special touch-layer on top of Windows.
But still, the issue of experience remains. Will there also be HP touch-optimized Apps? That’s a question worth asking. Arguably, the iPad has the upper hand with a sleek user interface, and a ton of apps developers only have to make “HD” or “XL.” Of course, the Slate’s ability to have multiple apps open at once will be instantly appealing, just — will the device be? When people pick it up, will they fall in love, or wonder what’s so special about it? The Slate is actually lighter than the iPad, but only slightly. I attribute that to plastic instead of aluminum, and that might make or break a deal when someone picks up both of them side-by-side.
Again, it boils down to a wait-and-see. But one thing is for certain; HP has their cross-hairs on Apple.
But will they miss?
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Could a Tablet Replace Your Notebook? - TheAppleBlog
PC World’s Jeff Bertolucci recently posed the rhetorical question, “Could a tablet replace your notebook?” He referenced not only Apple’s anticipated tablet computer but also new PC tablets like the one from Microsoft and HP that was pitched at CES, the chatter about which inclined him to wonder if a tablet/slate would work as a suitable notebook replacement.
Bertolucci thinks that for folks who use their laptops and/or netbooks primarily for light-duty web work like email and casual surfing, the answer may be the affirmative, and of course many have pretty much switched to using their iPhones or iPod touches for that type of duty. A tablet would presumably provide a larger display size as well as greater feature depth, so for that cohort, and in that usage context, such a machine could be quite satisfactory, and a step up from the handhelds in terms of performance.
However, for those of us who do serious production work on our laptops, not so much. I’m resolved to keep an open mind, but I’m exceedingly doubtful that a tablet will be a really well-suited tool for workaday production use.
Of course there are many as yet imponderables, especially in the context of an Apple tablet, such as whether the machine will support the standard Mac OS and application software or will run with a variant of the iPhone OS, limiting one to iPhone apps, and if there will be some provision for supporting a work-worthy external keyboard and mouse, rather than limiting users to touchscreen input.
On the OS support front, recent scuttlebutt is not encouraging. Earlier, Gizmodo reported new intelligence from someone they say has been a reliable source in the past that the new tablet will be basically an “iPhone on steroids,” and will be running an ARM CPU on the iPhone kernel rather than Intel Core power with the Mac OS, so Mac OS applications will not be supported. If that is accurate information, then it would pretty much rule out the Apple tablet as a serious work platform as far as I’m concerned, and along with prognostications of a $1,000 price tag, I would say good luck with that, Apple.
If the iTablet/iSlate or whatever really is going to be an “iPhone on steroids,” that would also make prospects for external keyboard and pointing device support murky, to say the least.
I simply can’t conceive doing production work on a machine without a physical (QWERTY) keyboard. I’m only a “semi-touch” typist, but I’m pretty fast, using most of my fingers in an idiosyncratic typing technique I’ve developed over the years — part visual and party spatial reference — and I find the lack of tactile feedback with touchscreen virtual keyboarding unacceptable for typing more than a paragraph or two. Not a problem, perhaps, for tweeting and texting, but not the thing for long-form typing projects.
Both handwriting and voice dictation support could have potential. I use MacSpeech Dictate a lot for entering text both as straight dictation and for transcribing material drafted by hand. Efficient and accurate handwriting recognition could potentially condense those operations into one, but only if scribbling on the tablet proved ergonomically comfortable. My flirtations with using handwriting recognition in OS X have not been encouraging, and personally, I would miss the tactile satisfaction of putting pen to good old low-tech paper, which seems to help me organize my thoughts more effectively.
Without Mac OS support, Dictate is out (along with much else), although MacSpeech or some other developer might eventually fill that void with an iPhone OS compatible dictation app. I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for that. I anticipate that I’ll be using laptops as my do-all tools for years to come yet.
How about you? Can you envision a tablet, especially one running the iPhone OS, displacing your laptop?
Related GigaOM Pro Research: Is The Age of the Web Tablet Finally Upon Us? and Rumored Apple Tablet: Opportunities Too Big to Ignore
Forecast for 2010: The Rise of Hybrid Clouds – GigaOM
For companies protective of their IT operations and data, wholesale public cloud computing adoption can be a difficult pill to swallow. But cloud momentum is too strong a trend to ignore. Enter the hybrid cloud — a panacea of sorts, enabling companies to maintain a mix of on-premise and off-premise cloud computing resources, both public and private, managed through a common framework to simplify operations. This concept has steadily gathered steam over the last year and a half, and now appears poised to capture the minds, and wallets, of corporations in 2010.
First, let’s take a look at the reasons leading corporations to consider hybrid clouds, then the means for them to get there. Data security and control are most frequently mentioned as the drivers for corporations to own and manage a portion of their infrastructure. Most corporations have longstanding cultural biases toward keeping core IT assets in-house that are unlikely to change anytime soon.
That said, companies also want to take advantage of public cloud resources. One reason hybrid clouds are proliferating is to enable “cloudbursting,” or the ability to seamlessly and automatically grow workloads into public cloud resources for a period of time, and then decommission them once the heavy loads subside. For industries such as finance and health care, compliance regulations limit the number of public cloud offerings they can use, forcing some of their infrastructure to remain in-house.
Simple negotiating leverage will lead companies not to put all of their eggs in one public cloud basket, and maintaining private infrastructure provides one way to control, although not necessarily minimize, infrastructure costs. Also, the demands of a typical enterprise do not have the wide load swings of web applications, and in the cases where resource demand can be forecasted, owning infrastructure as a financed capital expense can be more advantageous than high monthly operating expenses.
The hybrid cloud market is being addressed by large technology vendors as well as open-source software projects in what might be classified as the ultimate battle between lock-in and unlock. On the large vendor side, VMware has been busy enabling both enterprises and service providers with a range of virtualization tools to deliver migration of virtual machines between on-premise and off-premise infrastructures. The company’s vCloud Express initiative allows service providers to offer infrastructure as a service offerings for enterprises while maintaining compatibility with internal VMware deployments.
HP recently announced three offerings aimed at companies using both physical on-premise and cloud servers, including HP Operations Orchestration for provisioning, HP Cloud Assure for cost control, and HP Communications as a Service for service providers to offer small businesses on-demand solutions.
Microsoft has focused its Azure cloud platform on enterprises that can use the same Windows and .NET development frameworks on services internally and on the cloud. See our posts “Microsoft Azure Walks a Thin Blue Line” and “Will Microsoft Drive Cloud Revenues in 2010?” Even Amazon has started to reach towards hybrid deployment models with its Virtual Private Cloud service positioned as “a secure and seamless bridge between a company’s existing IT infrastructure and the AWS cloud.”
Approaching the market from another direction is a set of companies and open-source software projects that provide on-premise and public cloud integration. Eucalyptus is perhaps the best known in this category and provides open-source software infrastructure for on-premise cloud computing. Eucalyptus includes the ability to work within VMware environments and provision resources to Amazon Web Services.
Open Nebula, an open-source project out of the Distributed Systems Architecture Group at the Complutense University of Madrid, creates a new virtualization layer that “supports the dynamic execution of multi-tier services on a distributed infrastructure consisting of both data center resources and remote cloud resources.” And Nimbus, focused primarily on the scientific community, also provides a virtualization framework to help manage cloud deployments for infrastructure as a service.
The good news for enterprises considering hybrid cloud computing deployments is the range of options on the table. From the fully integrated end-to-end solutions like VMware or Azure, to the open-source solutions that provide more choice, the time is right to jump in and benefit from the cost savings, flexibility, and technology advances delivered by hybrid clouds.
The Other HP Slate Runs On Android
Last night, during his keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer showed off a prototype for a new HP Slate computer running on Windows 7. It was supposed to be an Apple-stealing moment and it was Microsoft’s moment, which is probably why Hewlett-Packard has not yet publicly mentioned that it is working on another tablet/slate computer that is running on Android. You know, Google’s mobile operating system.
HP did announce an Android-powered netbook yesterday, but that has a keyboard. A source who has seen a prototype of HP’s Android Slate says it looks just like the Windows-powered one Ballmer held last night (see image below), maybe a little smaller. “It is almost identical in every respect to the one he showed off except for the OS,” says my source.
And that, my friends, could be all the difference in the world. Already, developers have created more than 10,000 apps for Android mobile phones, and the launch of the Nexus One will keep pushing the OS into more and more hands. These apps might have to be modified for a tablet, but it shouldn’t be too much of a stretch. Already, a number of Android tablets are on the way from Archos, Dell, and Notion Ink. It looks like you can add HP to that list.
The bigger question that all of these Android tablets raise is what about Chrome OS? Maybe these are just stop-gaps until the Chrome Netbooks and Tablets are ready for the market.
What would you rather buy, an HP Slate that runs on Windows 7 or one that runs on Android?
(The video below is a sneak peek at the Windows HP Slate, which is where the image above is taken from):
Company: Website: code.google.com/android Android is a software platform for mobile devices based on the Linux operating system and developed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance. It allows developers to write managed code in Java that utilizes… Learn More
Website: hp.com Location: Palo Alto, California, United States HP is a seller of computer hardware, network software, printers, and other technology and imaging products.
According to Gartner, HP is the world’s largest seller of personal computers. Learn More
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