HP recalls 70,000 notebook batteries
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Blog, hardware, HP on
HP has today sent letters to thousands of customers world-wide as part of a global recall concerning potentially dangerous notebook batteries. It has been more than two years since I last wrote about dangerous battery recalls but the issue is now right back in the media spotlight it would seem. The United States Consumer Product Safety Commission has apparently received reports of batteries overheating and ‘rupturing’ which have caused minor property damage due to fire.
Here is the recall letter that has gone out to customers:
Dear Valued HP Customer,
In cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and other safety regulatory authorities, on May 14, 2009, HP announced a worldwide voluntary recall and replacement program for some of the battery packs used in certain HP, HP Pavilion, HP Compaq and Compaq notebooks. HP customers affected by this program will be eligible to receive a replacement battery pack for each verified, recalled battery pack at no cost.
We are taking this action as part of our commitment to provide the highest quality of service to our notebook customers. We are proactively notifying you of this issue and are prepared to replace all verified, affected battery packs.
Note: This recall is unrelated to any previous battery pack recalls.
HP and the battery cell manufacturer believe that certain battery packs shipped in HP notebook PC products manufactured between August 2007 and January 2008 may pose a potential safety hazard to customers. The batteries can overheat, posing a fire and burn hazard.
To reduce the likelihood that a battery pack failure will cause damage, stop using your battery pack immediately…
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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Welcome to Cisco’s Project California
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Business, networks, Standards, Green IT, IBM, hardware, HP on
With apologies to The Eagles:
Cisco stood in the doorway; I heard the marketing yell
And I was thinking to myself, this could be heaven or this could be hell
Now that Cisco Systems has landed with both feet firmly in the server business with the launch of its Project California ‘Unified Computing System’ the big question is will it rock the competition?
Certainly the whole point is to try and top the data centre charts with a mix of networking and virtualisation beats that Cisco hopes will worry the likes of old rockers IBM and Hewlett-Packard. Talk by Cisco CEO of “25 percent or more of the data centre market” might, however, be a little premature.
Not that there is anything inherently wrong with the UCS concept, which brings together both Ethernet networks and Fibre Channel storage with a single 10 Gbit/s FCoE link and so reduces cards and cabling while embedding a VMWare co-developed virtualisation module for server hopping fun in the switch.
Tim Stammers, a senior analyst at Ovum, reckons that Cisco’s move could “signal a milestone in the convergence of computing and networking.” According to Stammers businesses will want to buy their unified management systems from one supplier rather than stitching it together from multiple sources, which puts Cisco in a strong position. “Alongside the servers” Stammers explains “Cisco is also promising networking gear that it says will simplify connections to racks of virtualised blade servers.” Which could, in effect, mean Cisco server blades in the Nexus switch, eliminating complex I/O protocols between server application and network transport layers.
The small matter of competition is also something that Cisco might not need ne as worried about as some, generally speaking the competition itself it has to be said, are claiming. After all,
Cisco is already in competition with HP and IBM on the networking front. While HP has a small share of the high-end data centre networking market (Procurve switches) and IBM partners with Juniper, Cisco pretty much owns the data centre network side of things. “That” Stammers insists “highlights Cisco’s huge strength in a coming unified market.”
Of course, the question remains as to whether a networking giant such as Cisco can become a systems management player? But then again, on the flipside, server and systems suppliers need to become networking management specialists in order to survive in this new space.
There will be an avenue of opportunity as the Cisco market stalls, waiting for industry standards ratification for the FCoE protocol, but that is expected to close by the start of the summer. Which happily coincides with the scheduled release dates for the new Cisco blade server family of course.
As The Eagles sang: “They gathered for the feast, They stab it with their steely knives, But they just can’t kill the beast.” Which just might sum up the problems IBM and HP face in dealing with Cisco over the coming year.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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HP has print head in the clouds
By Davey Winder in Editorial
It will probably have passed most people by, not least because HP isn
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It’s the PC soap: Dell vs HP
By Davey Winder in Editorial
So, it is official then: Dell is no longer the world
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