back to article HP's great cloud server cattle roundup with Foxconn begins

Think servers, you think Hewlett-Packard – the world’s number-one by market share. HP makes $3bn a quarter on such machines; by virtue of owning Compaq, HP claims it made the industry’s first PC server, the SystemPro in November 1989. Aside from some claims on software and cloud, HP’s history is as original equipment maker ( …

  1. An ominous cow heard

    So uptime sometimes doesn't matter. Nor does data integrity. Sometimes.

    "you can’t obtain 100 per cent perfect uptime on everything."

    Maybe not.

    Those applications that don't care about uptime, do they also not care about data integrity?

    Payroll uptime doesn't matter for most of the month. But the data integrity matters every minute of every day when the system is running.

    Facebook? Google? They don't care about data integrity in the presentation layer (which is most of what they do), and it doesn't matter much elsewhere either.

    Interesting move by HP either way, so long as Foxconn don't start wanting to cut out the middleman. Which presumably limits how profitable this business can be for HP - make it look too rewarding and Foxconn or equivalent will want a slice of the business.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: So uptime sometimes doesn't matter. Nor does data integrity. Sometimes.

      "so long as Foxconn don't start wanting to cut out the middleman" They already do, it's HP that want to insert themselves into the middle.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: it's HP that want to insert themselves into the middle.

        Maybe.

        Joanna Public (well, maybe Marissa Meyer) wants to buy half a dozen Foxconn Cloudline-style servers for an evaluation, then maybe a few thousand more, but without the HP overheads.

        Who should she call? Foxconn? Supermicro? Dell? Intel?

    2. Mark Hahn

      Re: So uptime sometimes doesn't matter. Nor does data integrity. Sometimes.

      Integrity is easy - paxos, raft etc: it's not like you have to give up sensible, cheap, commodity features like ECC. It's only worth paying for "Enterprise" features if you can't do it the modern way for some reason: corporate culture, not smart enough, superstition, etc. The only surprising thing here is how long it's taken the Enterprise culture to start withering away.

  2. Ian Michael Gumby
    FAIL

    A photo of a Highland Coo?

    Sorry, but a long haired highland coo for a photo talking about rounding up cattle?

    Wouldn't a Texas long horn be more appropriate? (Ok so HP is more a Californian company which would probably be more Angus than anything.)

    You guys sure can talk about how to cook up a meal, but you need to work on your bovine management. ;-)

  3. Bring_Back_MPE

    This is another example of HP getting completely out of the manufacturing business. I have heard that their Americas focused Proliant manufacturing center (assembly & test), which was located in N.W. Houston, is in the process of being moved to Juarez Mexico ... of all places!

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Sloppy apps that need lots and lots of tiny servers to scale --- this is all about driving down cost.

    All the rest is rationalization.

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