It’s still about adding value according to HP’s software and services VP Tom Hogan. He was presenting to a group of 30 IT executives in London the other day and he thought he’d respect the mood of the moment. “I was very intentionally talking about cost reduction and efficiency because of all the uncertainty in the world economy. I wanted to pound the point on how IT can help save money,” he told us. But he’d read the mood wrong for the UK.

“It was interesting how many people said ‘Great, but we really don’t care about that. What we care about is how can we add more value in our line of business, because senior executives are still willing to spend more if they get the value from IT.’ It makes a point in this time of uncertainty. Ten years ago when the world was so unstable, IT would have been in shutdown. Now IT is so key that they’re still thinking about what to do next.”

Will what they do next include buying HP software? Take Mercury and Opsware and the ‘business technology optimisation’ tools that HP has built with them. They’re not tools for doing business with IT; they’re tools for turning IT into a business, for giving the IT department KPIs and scorecards they can track the way other business units do. Investing in IT that does IT might not be top of the shopping list tactically, but a real CIO does strategy these days.

Salesforce recently commissioned a survey of UK CIOs at small companies; Ian Parkes who conducted the research calls CIOs an endangered species. “They’re going to be rebranded as the chief operating officer or even removed. They’ve got to show value add, but they are not able to articulate it from the point view of looking for investment. Too often they do not have sufficient power to do what you would imagine a CIO would do, they are not board members and they don’t have that level of power or credibility within the organization.”

If you want to spend money on IT at the moment, you’re going to have to be able to explain the value and explain it in business terms.

-Mary

It’s time for IT to have its own ERP and CRM, according to HP. That’s what the business technology optimization tools it’s developed are for. Today that’s the product name, but it’s such a good phrase that Tom Hogan, the senior VP and global manager of HP software (and, since he bought EDS, services), is thinking of coming up with some other name so he can keep it as a description. It’s meant to make you think of business process optimization, where you discover the way your company does everything has been wrong all along and it’s going to take an expensive stint of consultancy to fix it.

The way most companies do IT is hand to mouth, piecemeal and manually intensive. Imagine a car assembly plant that hand-wrote scripts to control the robots every time a new part had to be made. If IT departments really were the cobbler’s children they’re often compared to, they’d have been barefoot so long they’d be placed in foster care. Most IT departments can’t add as much value to the business as the technology companies tell us their technology can deliver and that’s not just the gap between hype and reality. In a survey that the Economist Intelligence Unit just carried out for HP, an “overwhelming majority of both CEOs and CIOs” believe that “technology is integral to the success of their company” and 88% of CEOs and 90% of CIOs say they “share similar visions for how technology can deliver business outcomes at their company” - which is close enough that they must be at least on the same page. So what’s the problem? As usual, money.

The 70-80% of the budget most IT departments have been spending on maintenance rather than innovation has only just gone down to 60% according to a new survey in CIO magazine. If you’re doing really, really well, you’re only spending 35% keeping the lights on and if you’re supremely ambitious you want to get that down to 20%; maybe that’s the 7-10% of companies that Tom Hogan guestimates have already got their IT automated.

After all, why should the majority of your budget go on doing the same thing over and over again so that the business can stay where it was last month? You should have the routine automated; it will stop you losing staff to sheer and utter boredom too. But once you plug everything in enough to automate it and track it  - not just in terms of transaction throughput or whether the next laptop you buy will trigger a discount if you buy it from vendor H instead of vendor I but who has a problem, who’s about to have a problem, who’s working on it right now and who has already spent how long fixing what on what annual salary -  you can also start to put a value on it.

The next time you ask for a new server, you can show how much it’s costing to chug along on the old one - and what difference you’ve made with the last budget you were allocated. You can show which SLAs the IT team has met and what that means in cold hard cash. When you get asked to do too much with too little, instead of sucking your teeth like a builder you can say exactly what it will cost to do properly and what they can get for the money they want to spend. You can even tell the business what projects are a bad idea before you plug in a single server.

It’s not rocket science; a good project has high value to the business, a small cost to implement and a low budget requirement. The IT department spends the whole year putting in systems that let the rest of the business evaluate business ideas and existing services in those terms; isn’t it about time you had that for yourself too?
-Simon

We are no longer the people who are keeping the lights - now we are running the company, says Fadil El-Houssine, HP’s presales manager, speaking at the Software Universe event in Moscow. And at an airport, that means making the planes run on time.

Real-time information at Heathrow means knowing that the gate is due to close in five minutes and that there are another 24 passengers who aren’t on board yet. (Flying it out yesterday it was only one missing passenger with a bag on the plane and he turned up just after the pilot told us it wouldn’t take long to throw his bag out onto the tarmac). The system HP has built for what it describes as ‘one of the biggest airports in the world’ is a little more sophisticated. A reference to RFID scanners makes us suspect this airport is in Beijing, but most of what’s used for tracking isn’t RFID.

When you step out of the plane, you walk over a mat that deposits particles on the soles of your shoes; the next thing you walk on is a scanner that records the way those particles have stuck to your shoes. The system doesn’t need to know your name or scan your boarding pass; it just keeps track of where the passengers from that flight get to. So if the first person off the plane misreads the sign and turns left instead of right and everyone else follows the guy in front, the command and control centre sees they’re going the wrong way before they go too far and start milling around. If three of the five escalators are going up, leaving a crowd of people who obviously want to get to the baggage reclaim rather than back to the gate queuing to go down, then the system can automatically change the direction of two escalators (as soon as all the  feet it has tracked stepping on to the escalator are tracked stepping off). If there’s a build-up of people at passport control, or everyone is heading to the wrong baggage carousel, the airport team can see it in time to request more staff or make an announcement before everyone gets irritated.

What HP is showing off to the 1,600 attendees from its various Russian customers is the software to make managing a system like that possible, and the tools to make it worthwhile solving the problems at the time because you can see how much it’s costing you. Lights can’t turn off if people who should have been out of immigration half an hour ago are still queuing up, and you’re not making many sales if the CRM system is running at half its usual speed because the hard drive is too full. The difficult bit is working out the figures for what it costs you when something isn’t working the way you wanted and that’s the point at which IT turns into business technology.

–Mary (in Moscow)

When your battery runs out, your laptop is nothing more than a paperweight. More portable devices like the recent rash of ‘netbooks’ have short battery life – as low as 90 minutes for some of the Asus Eees – but at least they’re a lighter brick to carry around once they go flat. One of the reasons I haven’t personally seen the appeal of these little machines is that I already have a notebook that runs for an eight-hour working day without me checking behind cupboards for a power socket every few hours.

The HP 2710p tablet claims a nine hour battery life with the clip-on lithium polymer slab that adds a few millimeters to its thickness and I really do get over eight hours form it. The new model, the EliteBook 2730p, promises 12 hours – or 14 if I pay extra for the SSD drive. It’s a combination of the LED backlight and other low-power components and a large cubic volume of battery.

And if I wanted a 14.1” screen and didn’t mind it not being a tablet (I know I’m unusual in finding the ability to have all my written notes for years past in the same place as my typed notes invaluable, although I’m not sure why everyone doesn’t find this as useful as I do), the extra surface area would mean that with the same style of clip-on extra battery the EliteBook 6930p would give me a full 24 hours of work (or play).

That’s with the Intel SSDs announced at IDF the other week, but they only add an extra 7% to battery life. The real benefit of the Intel SSD is the 57% improvement in performance and the six times faster data transfer, but the extra speed means that the other components can go into low power states rather than waiting for a lower power but slower flash drive, which is why Intel may really deliver the promised benefits of flash drives. The rest of it comes first from improvements through the system – like more power-efficient Intel graphics drivers - and secondly from the sheer area of battery.

Although the first new battery chemistry in a long time will finally be available next year – silver zinc, which manufacturer ZPower says is 30-40% better than lithium ion – adopting a new battery type is very expensive for PC manufacturers. There’s proving it really does last longer, doing all the safety testing, changing all the charging circuitry and power adapters… and obviously it’s the buyer who will be paying for that, which means that customers have to make it very clear if they’re prepared to buy PCs with new types of battery rather than spending the extra money on an extended battery.

I used to track new battery chemistries closely and impatiently. Since I got the extended battery for the 2710p I’ve found myself feeling much less impatient. In my personal equation the 6930p would be too big to be worth the 24 hours of battery life. Getting four more hours of battery at the same weight as the 6210p is irresistible. And anyone who isn’t trying to cram a laptop in a handbag should find leaving the power supply at home almost priceless.

-Mary

Simulating the big bang and colliding particles at the speed of light takes a lot of space, makes a lot of data - and it isn’t going to blow up the planet.

The Large Hadron Collider has been running quietly for a week and no tiny black holes have made their way out through the giant concrete end caps yet, so the world is probably safe.

The collider itself is a vast confection of superconducting magnets and we were lucky enough to go down into the caverns last year while it was still being constructed. The scale of the shaft and the cavern are impressive enough; ATLAS is just one of the detectors on the ring and the structure dwarfs the engineers putting to together.

We’ve put together a look at the detector using Microsoft’s Silverlight DeepZoom technology.

An experiment like the Large Hadron Collider also produces a lot of data: 15 million gigabytes a year, streaming out of CERN to a worldwide computing grid at 2GB/second through an HP ProCurve infrastructure. The mainframes and supercomputers that processed the data in decades past have been replaced by rows of PCs. The cavernous computing centre looks like an old school gym; half of it is full of familiar tower cases, the other half is filling up with racks and blades and tape library robots as CERN builds its own mega-data centre.

You need a special invitation - or a research project - to get into the caverns at CERN, now that the LHC is switched on. But you can book a tour to see one of the other particle accelerators, decelerators and colliders where researchers try to recreate the first seconds after the Big Bang - or you can head down to the basement to see the Tim Berners-Lee’s first Web server.

A slightly battered NexT cube with a hand-written label peeling off from the front of the case, the memo of the original World Wide Web proposal lying over the keyboard; if there was a coffee cup in the display case, you’d expect Sir Tim to come back and sit down at any minute. Also behind glass is one of the first Cisco routers to make it to Europe; it’s a hefty beige box that cost $10,000 back in 1984.

Tours start in the dramatic wooden Globe of Science and Innovation, but take a minute to stand in the main reception area across the road. The coloured lights shooting through the concrete floor flash every time cosmic rays are detected; that bright blue could be a solar flare or a supernova.

-Mary

Where has 32GB of disk space gone and how do I make Vista give it back, or there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

When we’re on the road at conferences I take a fair few photographs, and I copy a lot of PowerPoints and PDFs onto my notebook, not to mention photographing products I’m reviewing, and then there’s recordings of interviews… It all takes up space, so when I got an 8 megapixel camera the day we drove into Death Valley I did wonder if disk space on my notebook might be a problem.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been kicking along with only a few gigabytes of my 84GB disk free. Simon, who has the same laptop and takes just as many photos, had already removed the recovery partition to get 8GB back. And last week at TechEd I got down to just 1GB free,. I grabbed the biggest USB stick I have, which at 32GB is a sizable proportion of my hard drive space, and started looking for files to move, using the excellent WinDirStat to see a treemap and size-sorted folder list. Recordings and photos were the obvious place to start and after I transferred a few gigabytes of those I had enough room to download more PowerPoints and worry later. The figures didn’t seem quite right, but I was spending more time thinking about how soon we could move the server to Windows Server 2008 to get faster network file copying with SMB 2: I want to know if the 30-40x Microsoft is claiming will work for us.

Yesterday I sat down to copy the photos and recordings still on my tablet PC onto the server and after removing 3GB of recordings I had - about the same space I’d started with. I’d get up to 2.2GB and then go back down to 1.9GB or right back to 800MB free. I ran disk cleanup and deleted two 500MB files of crash reports that were hanging around waiting to upload, and felt I was rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. I ran WinDirStat and wondered why Windows needs 13GB of disk space, 6GB of which is in the WinSxS directory - ’side by side’ versions of files to avoid DLL hell. I kept coming back to the 8GB of photos that I wanted to keep on my notebook, the 11GB I use for OneNote and Outlook caches (recordings and attachments again), the fact that the conference files I was worrying about where only 2GB because the XML PowerPoint format is so compact…  and finally I looked at the summary at the top of WinDirStat that was telling me I only had 46GB of files on my hard drive.

Oh no, I thought; finally an application I care about that doesn’t run properly under Vista. Maybe every folder is just bigger. WinDirStat says it’s 20.9GB for the Users folder tree but Explorer says- well Explorer said 20.9GB as well. It’s not the swap and hibernation files; I can see 3GB for each of them in WinDirStat and besides, 84.2GB-46.5GB is some 32GB of disk space that’s missing. I cleared everything except the last system restore point: no difference. If I had 32GB of bad sectors, the hard drive ought to have raised the white flag in surrender by now. Where else would Vista be hiding disk space?

There’s a great new feature that Apple put into the Leopard release of Mac OS X called Time Machine, that takes a copy of all your files as you edit them, creating continuous backup so you can find files you’ve deleted and undo changes you made long after you’ve saved a document and moved on. Apart from the starry backdrop and the timeline scrollbar this is exactly the same as the Volume Shadow copy that Microsoft put into Windows Server 2003, which powers the Previous Versions feature in Vista, as well as System Restore. Shadow because you have to copy the ’shadow’ a file casts if it’s open or you can’t copy it at all, volume because it can get any or all files on that drive and Volume Shadow because, let’s face it, Microsoft has no clue about good product and feature names.

The interface is much less sexy too; you right-click on a file or folder and choose Restore previous versions. And how do you see how much space this really useful feature is using?

First you have to open a command prompt as an administrator; I run as a standard user because I don’t mind clicking on a dialog that confirms it’s me and not a virus mucking with the internals of Windows, so I hit the Start button, type CMD and right-click on the Command Prompt icon that appears to choose Run as Admin.  The command for working with Volume Shadow Services is VSSAdmin and the command to find out how much space it has its shadowy fingers on is:

VSSAdmin List ShadowStorage

By default, Vista gives 15% of total disk space or 30% of free disk space to System Restore and Volume Shadow Services, whichever is smaller. There’s no slider to adjust as there was in XP and the space doesn’t change unless you turn System Restore on and off - which deletes all the previous versions and restore points, so while it’s easy it’s not really a good idea. But you’re going to want to check and probably change the setting because a lot of PCs seem to think 15% isn’t enough and set the upper limit to - well, all the free disk space you have.  In my case Vista had used 15GB of space for previous versions, it had allocated itself 16GB of space and the maximum space was UNBOUNDED. Yes, all my free disk space. I could have gone back to the day I turned on the notebook and got the files I was editing - but that’s not much use if I can’t create any new files.

Put some limits on VSS by typing:
VSSAdmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=C: /MaxSize=15GB
I was feeling parsimonious, and I keep most of the files on the SBS 2003 server which also runs VSS, so I gave it 5GB to play with. It allocated just over 2GB and filled 700MB immediately, so I suspect I get the changes on my files yesterday and nothing more. But I also get 39GB of free disk space, so I’m not complaining. 

I’m not sure if my notebook came from HP with VSS set to UNBOUNDED in first place or if SP1 might have changed this, so I don’t know who to name and shame. I have seen a lot of Vista users reporting that they’ve been losing disk space the same way, with UNBOUNDED set on machines from Dell, Lenovo and other big-name PC companies. But Microsoft gets a share of the blame, for adding a great feature with no way to control it except from the command line. Worried users will make the VSS space too small? Don’t take the slider away all together; just don’t let it go down below, say, 5GB. I can stop certain file types from getting shadowed by adding them to the HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\BackupRestore\FilesNotToSnapshot registry key. Temporary files are there by default; I’ll probably add MP3 files as I tend not to be editing these… but I’d rather do it without delving into the registry.

And if you’re running Vista Basic or Home Premium, VSS is running for System Restore and backing up your documents, but you can’t right-click to see and retrieve previous versions of a file even though they’re taking up space. Get a copy of ShadowExplorer  (only at version 0.2 but also free) from www.shadowexplorer.com and you can make the most of the disk space you agree to give up. 
-Mary

One of the highlights of the Future in Review conference is the chance to go to the supercomputing visualization lab at the University of California in San Diego, CalIT2. It’s run by Larry Smarr, who used to run the National Computing Supercomputing Applications where told one of his graduate students, Marc Andreessen,  to write a visual browser for the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee was working on over at CERN. When they showed NCSA Mosaic off, “everybody told us nobody needed it”, he says.

Given how wrong, that turned out to be, it’s worth keeping an eye on what Smarr thinks is important – bandwidth and pixels. Not content with the bandwidth of Internet2, he’s been putting together a multigigabit network connecting universities around the world for sharing data and collaborating over video conferencing. And making video real enough to suspend your disbelief means a lot of pixels; the 60-foot screen in the CalIT2 lecture theatre has four times the resolution of HD, the standard digital cinema will use when the movie theatres work out how to make money from it. To kick off the evening, Smarr invites Microsoft’s Curtis Wong to show off the 12 terabytes of images in the new World Wide Telescope, a map of the sky that zooms from star fields to galaxies to the solar systems coalescing inside them out of dust, fading into infra-red and wavelengths that show more structures.

The 30″ screens on most desks around the lab are dwarfed by the 200 megapixel video wall - eleven rows of five 30″ Dell screens crammed side by side to make one giant display with 100 times the resolution of HD. There are displays that wrap around the edges of a small room, stretching over your head and powered by eight HD projectors, that show us the surface of Mars in 50 million pixels rather than the 2 million pixels from the Word Wide Telescope.
 
It’s not size to prove screens can keep getting bigger; Larry Smarr thinks we need the bigger view. “We’ve artificially limited our brain by this stupid million pixels on a screen and we’ve unblocked that.” So how much more can we see; is there a limit? “Reality! You don’t see everything you think you see - it’s not as simple as pixels. There’s a limit to what you can resolve spatially, above 24 frames per second you don’t really see more. But the brain is capable of absorbing about 1gigabit per second, 24 bits deep 16 million colours. ”

From medical images to satellite maps, there are plenty of images to enjoy at that size. You can see the intricate details inside cancer cells or watch winter spread over the world. You can stand inside a building that exists only as a CAD diagram and walk through lifesize doors to see if the layout works. You can step forward to see the hidden sketch under a Leonardo painting, revealed by infrastructure-red photography and displayed so you can see every line. Or you can watch life-size opera live from the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, or the opening ceremony of the Nobel prize from Japan and fill like you’re almost there. Every candle flame, every reflection, the brocade patterns on every kimono, the expression on every face.

These are the technologies that are coming to office video conferencing if you have the network bandwidth. Smarr advised HP on developing the Halo system and he’s putting in a Cisco TelePresence room at CalIT2 for academics to use for collaborations. The commodity hardware and open source software that powers the high-resolution screens isn’t as expensive as those. Each screen of what Larry Smarr calls the optiputer - systems connected by optical fibre that make up a worldwide computer system - costs about $2,000. But of course the bandwidth is what really raises the price tag.  Cisco TelePresence needs about 10Gbps; the big screen system is over ten times more.

Every three seconds, HP sells a printer (two of them in Europe). That makes HP responsible for a lot of the 22 pages office workers print every day, half of which end up in the bin. All that paper and ink can make it hard to think of HP as particularly green, especially when Vyomesh Yoshi, the VP of the print and imaging division, talks about wanting to see more pages on HP printers.

Naturally enough, he doesn’t think it’s what much of a contradiction. “We are in the printing business; we don’t want customers to not print. We have to make sure they use it, but also make sure they use it effectively. We want to make sure every printer they buy from HP has lower energy consumption than any other printer. ” Make sure printers turn on “instantly” and people will be happier to turn them off; use the WebJet admin software to turn printers off at the weekend and you’ll save even more energy. “Make duplex printing the default and you can save a tremendous amount,” he says.

And if you think we throw away a lot of paper in offices, 20% of newspapers are discarded, as are 40% of books and 20-30% of marketing bumph. People print too many copies that go out of date, because of the setup charges on offset printing. Naturally again, HP has a solution; customised on-demand printing for everything from wine labels to out of print books.

HP is also pushing green ideas for the data centre like running the air conditioning four degrees higher by blowing cold air directly into the blades. The air coming out the back of the blades is a lot hotter - more like a sauna - but heat behind the blade doesn’t matter so much. But if CEO Mark Hurd is right to predict that data centres will use 50% less energy soon, it’s going to take more than hot air.

The reason smart cooling works is that HP puts sensors on each rack to make sure the air is only as cold as it needs to be. Without those, says HP fellow Chandrakant Patel , a home air conditioning system is more sophisticated what’s in most data centres. The next step is to use optical interconnects and lasers to replace copper data cables - which saves the 20% of your energy that’s heating and cooling the copper. More likely now HP Labs has come up with a photodetector so sensitive it works as a solar cell.

But the carbon footprint of a data centre includes the CO2 from the concrete used to build it, and the manufacturing and transportation of everything from the blades to the carpets. Really reducing that means calculating it and Patel is working on a framework to cover technology in general. That would measure the true energy cost, down to what it takes to deal with the fertilizer runoff from the fields growing the corn that’s made into the ethanol that goes into the biodiesel that drives the backup generator. It’s a huge undertaking, but it strikes me as more likely to help than maintaining that video conferencing can solve the problem by taking cars off the roads (hint: maybe not if that means more data centres to run the video conferencing).

Microsoft makes a lot of noise. The company holds dozens of conferences, broadcasts its ambitions in every market from mobile phones to data centres to next-generation TV, goes on a buying spree, gets taken to court by everyone from Novell to the EU. HP also makes acquisitions and has ambitions in a lot of markets and employs over twice as many people as Microsoft, but it doesn’t make nearly as big a splash in the industry, for some reason. It’s not for lack of success. Microsoft boasts of the 31 million Windows Mobile phones it’s sold; HP boasts that eight out of every ten text messages are sent using HP technology (inside the mobile operators rather than in your hand).

Wherever Microsoft is, HP is there too (from mobile phones to data centres to next-generation TV); in almost all cases, selling infrastructure rather than competing software. The exception is system management and when a dealer asked Mark Hurd this week why he’d asked Steve Ballmer along to the event where HP was sharing what it wanted dealers to get excited about this year, Hurd pointed out that even there HP takes a wider view. “Microsoft is very focussed about managing Windows environments and Microsoft environments. That’s what’s important to them. And it makes sense for them to be the best in the world at that. We have to be the best in the world at managing heterogeneous environments; we have to be able to take an IBM environment, a Linux environment, a ‘insert name here’ environment and be the best. Microsoft has to optimise simplicity of management of the Microsoft environment. We don’t believe the world will ever be exclusive to Microsoft.”

Ballmer wasn’t offended by that and used the broader view line himself, emphasising all the places from printers to blade servers where the two companies collaborate. He’s also banking on HP to put some style and sparkle back in a PC marketplace that can look lacklustre compared to Apple products that look good even when they can’t compete on features. “We’ve got a lot of work we’re doing on the future of the PC and what that looks like; driving down price, driving up features, driving more excitement. Certainly neither Microsoft or HP likes the shots we’ve been taking with Apple’s adverts and the blah blah blah… On the consumer side there’s so much opportunity today, we can add value to business productivity ; we’re stepping back to remind ourselves what we can do.”

Adding features matters more than driving the price down to get businesses to keep buying new PCs every three years rather than pushing older machines to last a decade and that’s where HP Labs comes in.
HP cares about research, but it’s a means to an end – solving problems by creating products and services – rather than pure knowledge. For pure knowledge you stay in academe; although Microsoft’s Bill Buxton points out that he left academic research for commercial when he was asked to write business plans rather than papers. Mark Hurd is totting up his R&D dollars but it’s not the cost he complains about; “We spend 4.2 billion in R&D to get the best products and services and then only go after half of the market.”

Rather than squeezing the research budget specifically, he’s leveraging it and putting more emphasis on the D than the R. HP Labs looks five to ten years ahead, but it also collaborates with engineers to create products. Microsoft Research uses a mix of technology transfer and researchers who move across to product development groups to shepherd their project into the commercial world. The really important thing is that they can always go back to research afterwards; their job is guaranteed to be there.

HP takes a different approach. Phil McKinney is the CTO of the personal systems group – everything from iPaqs to the Blackbird gaming system that’s selling to developers to the 2710p tablet PC we both use to the shiny and cute new 2133 Min-Note UMPC (which manages to achieve Apple levels of desirability despite the Via C7-M processor – which might make it even more like an Apple product). But he also runs the Innovation Programme Office and I don’t think it’s named IPO by accident; it’s certainly about taking things public.
The way it works is that a team from the IPO works side by side with the researchers (quite literally; they sit at the next desk). For 12-18 months the two teams work together; the researchers carry on researching, the designers build products and gradually the researchers do less and less and the designers do more and more. Then one day the designers have learned everything the researchers have found out and they spend six months running that into the final product.

There are 28 products in the pipeline with the IPO, coming out two a year – which means starting with 1,800 pipedreams that get whittled down to 200 ‘workable’ ideas. Blackbird was the first, cherry-picking existing HP technologies like blade cooling and push-fit hard drives. The new DreamColor screens are the second. These are LCD screens with colour accurate enough to satisfy DreamWorks and there’s a 30” screen on the way. And there’s a team in HP Labs right now, sitting next to the data centre than rendered Shrek 2, working on the next project. Odds are, it will be something that Microsoft will be interested in…

Sometimes weeks have a theme. This last week’s was most definitely virtualisation.

Cannes in February is a refreshing change from an English winter, and it’s where HP were announcing their latest storage virtualisation platform - along with servers that come with VMware’s ESX 3i hypervisor built-in. Getting the right physical infrastructure for your virtualised server farm is becoming increasingly important, along with beign able to deploy your virtualised images quickly.

That’s where ESX 3i comes in handy - it’s a 32MB hypervisor that doesn’t need an OS. Boot your server, connect to the hypervisor from one of VMware’s handy management tools, and you’re ready to configure the hard disk and deploy all the virtual machine images you need (and if you’re using BEA’s Liquid VM thin Java servers that can be a lot!). Now that most of the major industry standard server vendors support ESX 3i, with hardware shipping from IBN, Dell and Fujitsu as well as HP, it’s going to be easy to quickly add new compute resources to a virtual infrastructure. All you’ll need to do is order the appropriate server from your usual vendor, shove it in the rack (or the blade host), and a few mouse clicks later you’ve got a server.

Microsoft is going to have to do a lot to compete with this. Its Hyper-V VM is still several months away - and it will still need its own partition to run and manage the rest of the virtual machines running on your server hardware. Sun’s xVM will have similar issues, as will the open-source Xen hypervisor.

HP’s launch was in its Sophia Antipolis offices, as VMworld Europe was just down the road. With more than 4500 attendees, it was definitely the place to be if you were running a virtual infrastructure. BT’s plans to roll out a service oriented virtual network with global load balancing was a benchmark for the maturity of virtual infrastructures, and a fascinating look at how businesses can encourage the move to virtualisation. BT’s decision to make physical server implementations subject to a rigorous review process and hefty chargebacks is intended to make this an economic decision - with virtualisation the clear winner on ease of deployment and lower costs.

At Vmworld Europe the thin client was one of the elephants in the room. While the server products got the stage time, client virtualization got a set of ropy demonstrations which were, to say the least, confusing. Conflating VMware’s impressive VDI virtualised desktop tools with managed desktop virtual machines, CEO Diane Greene demonstrated how virtual machines could be deployed to desktop PCs, and how thin client applications could be used offline and on the road. Given that presentation it would be easy to confuse two very different ways of managing virtualised desktop environments.

Microsoft made a lot more of client virtualisation at its 2008 server wave launch last Wednesday. That’s not surprising, especially when you consider that its big server success story of the moment is its relatively recent acquisition SoftGrid. Delivering applications over the network is a powerful way of controlling user desktops, and reducing your support costs. SoftGrid’s impressive sales figures are even more impressive, when you realise it’s only available through Microsoft’s volume licensing programme.

Perhaps the ideal infrastructure is a hybrid. VMware virtual servers hosting enterprise applications, with SoftGrid -wrapped applications streaming from the server network on to desktop PCs. The PCs themselves might be thin clients fed by Citrix’s tools running on an array of desktop blades somewhere in your data centre. It’s all a blast from the past - the mainframe is back.

This time, however, it’s an ever-growing array of industry standard servers hosting a virtual infrastructure, while applications are delivered to not green screens, but thin client devices with HD quality LCD panels. It’s a brave new enterprise IT world out there.

–Simon