[Info-vax] HP squeezes 85 data centers into 'six-pack'

[JF Mezei]

Neil Rieck wrote:
> HP squeezes 85 data centers into 'six-pack' (from Dec-01,2008)
> 
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/01/hp_data_centers_done/

Not to diminish this project, one needs to take some of the numbers with
a grain of salt.

Looking back at Digital. When Palmer decided to axe All-In-1, he also
brag about internal cost savings. So he retired countless systems
running All-in-1, and installed Microsoft ones runing exchange.

The money spent on All-In-1 stayed in-house. So while various divisions
may have had big bidgets for ALL-IN-1, it was money that stayed in the
family. So when they switched to Exchange, all of a sudden, money was
now flowing out to Microsoft.

Similarly for HP, they may brag about having reduced many in house
packages to SAP, but now that is money flowing out of the company.

Also, HP isn't bragging about the fact that national laws do prevent it
from hosting many functions across national boundaries (think data
privacy laws, especially since patriot act killed any semblant of data
privacy in the USA).

I suspect that HP still has many functions (such as payroll) running in
national data centres around the world, or perhaps it has outsourced
those to 3rd parties just so it can brag about not running its own data
centre in that country).

In terms of reduction of servers, what is not clear in the article is
whether this refers only to hardware, or if it refers to licences and OS
instances. (aka: consolidate 15000 instances onto 1500 hardware servers,
or consolidate 1500 instances into 1500 instances running on 15000 servers).