It's all smoke and mirrors now at HPE. Nothing left but financial manipulation and massive self promotion. More layoffs are in planning for the upcoming holiday season (October through November). Overly complicated hardware is no longer relevant in a virtualized and software controlled market place. HPE leadership knows this, but can't turn the ship fast enough. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon cloud offerings will continue to erode HPEs hardware based data-center focus. HPE will likely go private and then implode like so many others.
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Wow is this a tech forum? Or a discussion about layoffs by none other than HPE. The rudderless, leaderless, shell of a company? Steering into the Abyss toward the iceburg I call MEG! Stick a fork in the proverbial HPE ticker symbol. It's done. With Michael DELL back it will get interesting! DELL is hiring and HPE is firing. I work for neither. Nor do I ever plan to in the future.
Well, guess their hope is on hyper-converged infrastructure aka Hellfire. In development since more than 1.5 years. Several times delayed because HP management knows best how to not manage software. Now again delayed to integrate Simplivity as a storage layer.
Hellfire or Hyper Converged 380 looks pretty nice. But is a monster in terms of memory and disk requirements. Plus part of the core software will belong to MicroFocus soon. Kind of a fun situation ;-)
But I think HPE could succeed with that and compete with Nutanix etc...
I remember when working for a now defunct hdd company we got back a couple of boxes from Google that were sheets of tin formed into a simple box with a couple a fans & pwr supplies that were held to the metal with velcro. Unfortunately they would use velcro to stack 2 or 3 hdd's together. We told them they had to separate the drives since the seeking of the heads would interact with each other. After that we never heard from them again except to buy a few more drives.
That's not true. I've seen the hardware used by Facebook, and I understand that Google is similar. These companies are large enough that they don't need to buy servers designed by Dell or HPE, they design their own.
For instance, if you're purchasing 10,000 servers and you don't need eight DIMM slots, why pay for them?
Back in the VERY early days of Google, I heard rumors that their servers were on bread trays in bread racks, but I've never seen anything that indicated that was more than a rumor.
"Overly complicated hardware is no longer relevant..."
Is way-way correct! The likes of Google, for example, do NOT even bother with chassis (boxes) any more; have not, for quite some time! Just lay out server boards and expansions (plus power supplies and moderate-sized plain simple batteries for back-up during power outages) on some cheap wooden or plywood shelves, and be done with it!
This lesson (hardware simplicity) should have been learned in the Carly F. days and earlier, when "hot swap PCI" was technically way-way cool, but customers did not trust it and did not want it...