HP Winds Down Cloud Computing Project | Hacker News Reader

HP Winds Down Cloud Computing Project

wsj.com

41 pointsjaymoorthi43 comments

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Relevant and prescient Onion video: http://www.theonion.com/video/hp-offers-that-cloud-thing-eve...

That was hilarious. The comment about crowd sourcing made me fall over laughing.

We have app.

I guess 1000 cloud storage capacity wasn't enough.

Let's just remember that HP is led by someone who doesn't understand the fundamentals of large scale cloud computing:

"We hear all the time that people are building their own servers. There are a few...that are building their own servers," she said. Whitman continued. "[But] right now, they're not building their own servers because they can't get the disk drives. So they're calling us...Yes, the Googles, the Facebooks are doing some of that, but I will tell you, they're all calling us right now because they don't have the ability to get the drives," she said, addressing the hard disk drive shortage that has resulted from the flooding in Thailand.

In the decades-long string of stupid things said by HP executives, this one stands out in my memory. Nobody from Facebook or Google considered for even a single nanosecond buying datacenter computers from HP.

I don't understand. It sounds like she's just saying they are calling HP to buy drives for their own servers. Which easily may have been true right?

It doesn't sound like she's saying they're now buying HP servers.

No, I don't think it could easily have been true at all. Google puts the worst, cheapest drives they found on the side of the road in their servers. HP sells a 36GB SAS drive for $2000.

Actually at the time Facebook was buying a large number of servers from HP and having them built with Fusion IO drives for their database systems. Not sure when they scaled that back to their own custom built stuff.

I can't say I've ever seen someone refer to Hewlett-Packard as H-P before now. I've always seen it just as HP.

WSJ seems to do it regularly in 2015[1], though they're not totally consistent.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=h-p+site%3Awsj.com&oq=h-p+si...

Consider using a 0 based index, instead of 1, as it is easier on the eyes.

Big publications like the WSJ frequently have an official "style guide" -- an internal document that specifies for the sake of consistency how people who write for them should handle things like acronyms, abbreviations, punctuation, slang terms, and so forth. Sometimes they also make these documents available for sale to the public. The WSJ does that: http://www.amazon.com/Street-Journal-Guide-Business-Guides/d...

If you're logged into Amazon when visiting that page, use their "Look Inside" view and search for "Hewlett" and it'll jump you right to their style rules for stories about HP.

From what I understand "HP" is the old combined business and the new consumer business.

HPE and H-P refer to "Hewlett-Packard Enterprise" the new spin off.

So OpenStack is now officially dead on the public cloud. The writing has been on the wall for years.

We'll see how long the "private cloud" movement lasts with the results that Amazon has been posting, and with IBM hiring every OpenStack developer they can find.

What was the last thing HP did that wasn't rubbish?

HP Deskjet Printers. They were good at the time and for a long time the best... good ol times :D

The HP-28S

I bought a 28S in 1989 or 1990 and it's still working. Last year I saw the HP 35s and bought one. I'm still using the 28S even though my battery door is broken as is some of the plastic around the battery door.

The 35s is soooo close to being a great device, but a few things drive me nuts.

Their server hardware has always been excellent. I'd pay extra if they didn't take 3 minutes from power on to booting :)

The microservers weren't too bad: http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/proliant-servers/product-d...

For those of us that just have to have a web server in our bedrooms.

I'll second that. I used one for about three years with Windows Server 2008, primarily as a NAS and for playing around with Windows domains. Cost me less than £100 (plus HDDs), held five 1.5TB hard drives, ran near silent, and was reliable.

I've also got a HP PSC1215 scanner/printer that is over a decade old and still works fine. I can't really speak to the overall quality of HP gear, but the few pieces of hardware I've used from them have been pretty solid.

Their storage is a good value for the money too. If you want to talk enterprise, the NonStop Integrity platform is as reliable as z/OS. That's real niche though. That's about it though. Their enterprise software is as bad as CA. They aren't really innovating anything interesting.

Do you count Agilent products as HP? Probably not, but if so they make a bunch of pretty solid instruments. And arguably the name "HP" should be associated with the entity that today we call "Agilent."

Did you mean Agilent as in Agilent, or Keysight, or Avago?

There LTO tape drives, or at least I'm very happy with my LTO-4 one.

The ProLiant micro servers are pretty good for a home / small office environment.

Also, we have three managed 24/48 port switches at work that have not given me any grief.

(We also have an EliteBook 17" notebook that for its price of ~ €1700 should totally kick ass but instead seems to be the slowest notebook in the entire company. All in all, HP notebooks seem to be more trouble than their counterparts from, say, Lenovo or Dell.)

Rackspace Inc. announced earlier this year that it would no longer sell such services

What?

Rackspace has gradually transitioned from "cloud with optional support" to "support with cloud thrown in" to "support for AWS".

HP is everywhere in the enterprise, from servers to desktops and every peripheral in between. I doubt they are going away any time soon. But as tech evolves, it does seem like the company is being left behind. I predict another IBM in the making.

You know they still sell mainframes? You just don't typically see that in the news.

You do realize IBM has hired the top OpenStack talent that was previously at HP building this public cloud.

Hopefully this doesn't affect their whole memristor project. While the increasingly vaporware status of The Machine (dun-dun-dun) has been disheartening, I like that they were trying to move past von-Neumann (sp?).

I'll never forget what they did to Palm, so wither HP, wither.

Long live the Palm Pre. WebOS and the card system was years before iOS had something similar. Palm created something good but still need improvement. HP made situation worse.

That and their rush job and initial over pricing of the HP Tablet (which then lead to the infamous $99 fire sale)

The $149 each I paid for a couple of the maxed out tablets was money well spent. I still keep them on the coffee table and pop open a browser when I want to look something up really quick. As long as I don't leave WiFi enabled when not in use, battery life is measured in months.

Who needs cloud computing anyway?

SaaS vendors.

Also we should stop or block people from posting links from wsj.com because they asked to sign up for membership before you can read more.

From the FAQ[1]

Are paywalls ok?

It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.

In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Does anyone else find it ironic/hilarious that YC considers customer complaints about their product to be "off topic".

Just google the title and you can hop right into the story.

That's what the "web" link under the title does for you, just for that reason.

That link should probably say "google", not "web".

Select the title from the article, right-click on it and search your favorite search engine. Or subscribe.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=H-P+Winds+Down+Cloud-Computin...

http://www.nasdaq.com/article/hp-winds-down-cloudcomputing-p...

http://www.infoworld.com/article/2996184/cloud-computing/hp-...

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