I finally found the time to publish my write up on HP Discover that ended on December 1st, unfortunately I brought home a really bad flu that hampered my ability to do any work and resulted in a long absence from blogging and social media.

It’s been a hell of a week at HP Discover in lovely Vienna, Austria; the HP world is huge and they definitely deliver a conference package that is compelling to every shade of the computing industry.

HP is trying to get back on track after the whole Apotheker brouhaha that happened earlier this year, Meg Whitman, the new CEO, sincerely apologized to customers and partners during the first plenary session committing to “take the HP drama out of the headlines”, her guide looks solid and I’m sure she’s focused on solving the challenges that HP is facing right now, both internally and externally.

On the product side we’ve seen a good push on backup / dedupe technology with the new B6200 StoreOnce Backup System that was announced during the show, with its whopping 28TB/hr restore performance it poses to be the new king in the dedupe arena, even if it still misses a global deduplication cache and a single backup target is limited to its couplet (which is an active-active HA pair scaling up to four for maximum configuration).

The other product launched at the Vienna Messe is the new low-end file serving solution called X5000 G2 Network Storage Systems, which is an interesting piece of technology, it’s a 3U chassis with two c-class blade slots and a disk drive bay that houses up to 16 LFF disk drives (can be expanded with D2000 shelves) that can be shared between the two compute nodes thanks to the HP P1210m storage controller, already employed in the E5000 messaging product. The X5000 G2 Network Storage System runs on Windows Storage Server 2008 R2.

I also had the chance to sit down with some interesting people from the Cloud division and HP Labs that respectively talked about the HP Cloud strategy and a new industry-wide storage effort called SCSI Express, both these topics will be featured in upcoming posts complete with video and pictures.

Greg Knieriemen has an interesting episode of Nekkid Tech recorded with David Scott, Senior VP of HP Storage, during HP Discover, check it out here.

HP and Ivy Worldwide packaged a really neat event: informative, engaging and rewarding. I definitely appreciated the “Coffee talks” that sparked so many interesting discussions between bloggers and HP representatives, a remarkable effort that gave us the chance to have unfiltered direct access to HP technologist. Bloggers were treated like rockstars by HP and Ivy with great accommodations, reserved seats and tables with wired connection during the plenary sessions and timely transportation between locations, definitely one of the best event organization that I ever experienced.

DISCLAIMER: HP invited me to the event and covered traveling and lodging expenses but I’m under no obligation to write, tweet or say anything about the event.