Composable infrastructure?
I confess I read that as Compostable infrastructure - which seems pretty accurate.
HPE, or Hewlett Packard Enterprise to you and me, has announced Synergy, rich with new buzzwords for existing concepts and the promise of brand new hardware to woo and wow. With general availability in Q2 2016, Synergy is taking the lead in HPE's "composable infrastructure" push ... but what lies underneath all the marketing …
Bollox. HP(E) lost it when they were taken over by EDS. Before that they engineered solutions - reasonably honestly, even if not always successfully (see rest of industry). The Compaq reverse takeover started the rot, then EDS, and now it really is all about how you can screw the customer - step one, big wool blanket, eyes, apply.
"While the comments section of this article will no doubt fill up with innumerable snippets about how the old-timers are perfectly happy with their pet servers running on an abacus they build out of rocks and crushed flower stems,"
It's like you have 1980s_coder in the room with you while you're writing....
The thing to remember about pets and cattle is that the latter get slaughtered. Whilst you're busy herding your cattle your salary is probably being paid by business running on some pet server. Or, looking at it another way, when some service goes TITSUP maybe it was because one of the cattle got slaughtered.
"DevOps or Continuous Integration (CI) types"
You actually mean Continuous Deployment here. Continuous integration is a different thing not related to pushing servers and code out, although often done within the same workflows and toolsets. In this instance though it looks like you definitely are talking about CD rather than CI.
Exactly. It's no suprise it's HPE talking about that. You need a significant amount of resources to make it work properly, which may be still outside the capabilities of many mid-sized and small companies. As soon as you start to spend more and more resources on automating most tasks, you still need enough resources to deliver new features that can actually be sold (and bring in enough revenues to pay it all), because no customers of yours will buy your DevOps efforts. It is true more quality pays, but still, you need more capable, appealing products - especially if you're an ISV, and not part of an internal development team without market competition.
I won't blame too much mid- and small-sized business if they can't really afford the costs in hardware, software and people to tackle such an effort.
I agree. Sell first, fix later. I've seen this for a long time from HP salesmen. and definitely don't expect HP support to be any real help. Their go to reply is to pass it back to QLogic, Emulex, Broadcom or even the OS manufacturer.
"Far more time is spent automating testing, quality assurance, regression testing and error handling than is spent pushing out new code or automating deployments.
The result is a remarkably agile company, one with processes in place to handle a variety of crises, from security problems to physical disasters to massive spikes in demand for resources."
Indeed and those two lines of code per quarterly release will be fabulously good, along with all the changes to support regression, QA, automation, etc. Pretty soon we won't need coders at all and we won't bother altering the product. We'll just keep improving the testing until everything is a known issue...
Humbug (and a good way to be overtaken by someone who actually ships product...).
"At its core, hyperconvergence is a way of consuming storage and compute resources in an appliance format"
That's the best explanation I've read so far of wtf hyperconvergence actually means, but I still don't understand it.
Could someone please explain what it is supposed to mean, using words that this sysadmin will understand? (ie words like 'disk', 'SAN', 'network', not 'converged' or 'agile')
Ahh, thanks. Perhaps you should re-run that article, but change the headline to "Don't know what hyper-convergence is? Read this".
So basically you have a bunch of relatively cheap servers which are used to provide distributed storage like a SAN, but also run VMs (and/or containers), is that about right?
HPE can borrow other company's innovation and label it their own. Intel RSA and Brocade NFV are examples. None of the Composable Synerygy technology claims are possible without the actual innovation from processor, memory and HDD/SDD hardware companies. HPE's contribution appears to be marketing. Notice HP revenue in 2010 was $127.25B and it is now $103.36B. in 2011 Meg W claimed she would make China 25% of HP revenue. At the time China revenue was less than $700M and China had a massive sales and management staff turnover issue. Today China is probably less than 1% like was before Meg. Memristor was supposed to be available in 2013. The Machine was supposed to be here last year. Has anyone seen either? HP and HPE have twice the number of employees to revenue as Cisco, Dell, Lenovo or IBM. When I see HPE I see compost.