Mayday, mayday. Cray, you cray cray: Investor attempts to halt HPE's $1.3bn biz gobble A cray cray Cray investor is attempting to scupper the supercomputer builder's pending $1.3bn acquisition by HPE, by proposing a class-action lawsuit. Russell Davie reckons Cray broke America's finance laws in providing a “materially incomplete and misleading” preliminary proxy statement to the Securities and Exchange …
As with most other HP acquisitions, they don't want to be another casualty. Can you blame them?
HP has the rep to ruin/run everything they touch into the ground, so probably some pride in them not just capitulating and staging themselves for burial up front.
Maybe HP will try to bring back the Cray Itanium Division in fabulous collaboration with Intel for planned obsolescence and go figure, upgrade to something less craptastic!
HP calculators were, and still are, gems even if they're unsupported now.
I have an HP 21 that I bought in 1976 that's still in daily use, though I've had to chop its battery holder open to fit new rechargeables more than once, moving from NiCd to NiMH and now hybrids.
I also have an HP28S, bought in 1990, that's in perfect nick and runs for years at a time on a set of three LR1 alkalines.
I agree with what people have said about their laser printers (I have a modern Laserjet M402dne that I'm very pleased with) and would add that their pen plotters also 'just worked' - and still would if you could find new pens for them.
That is one of the stock images that was published when the UK Met. Office installed their Cray XC40s back in 2015.
In fact, this is not of the XC40 computer cluster itself, but of the Seagate/Xyratex storage for it, which used Dell rackmount x86 servers to control the storage, which is not so impressive, and is of the initial test system (which was a small XC30, though later upgraded) that was installed at the tail end of the evaluation phase.
And the reason it leapt out at me? In the background is one of the IBM 9125 F2C Power7 775 supercomputer clusters that I used to provide support for when I was working there!
Given their history with buying companies and running them in to the ground HP should have to pay a premium if buying a business.
If I were a shareholder I would want 4x what it is worth from HP to compensate me for future losses.
So if a company is worth around $3billion I would demand HP offered $12billion.
Hang on, have we discovered how the Autonomy valuation was arrived at?
is that there's no profit in it.
There's plenty of revenue, but it's all volume revenue without profit revenue.
HPE, Dell, Lenovo, IBM all cut their throats to design and sell thee HPC designs, but it's really volume revenue to help subsidise profitable business elsewhere. There are exceptions, such as when it's a government contract, or where Intel/AMD/etc are funding a large slice of the cost, but looking at the numbers from Cray, it's difficult to stand alone as an independent in a volume business space.
A sales colleague of mine always refers to HPC as Half Price Computing
Not too long ago I was with a customer complaining about one vendor - how their prices didn't reduce in line with Moore's Law (they had bought an HPC cluster several years before and expected to get at least twice the performance from the same $$$ outlay). With these expectations, it is hard for any hardware vendor to get rich on HPC alone
Jc
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