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Scalability Rules
The HP Tech Day had some deep dive content that kept a number of the invited guests busy - for example, Ben Rockwood http://www.cuddletech.com/blog wanted to dispense with the GUI's, spend the day on the command line and with ample supplies of coffee get to the bottom of all this.
Since I'm not a professional IT admin, that had a little less appeal - although to be honest, I was able to follow the demos at the command line as well or better than the GUI based ones - I think simply because it was in smaller chunks.
What I did get from Richard Warham's talk on Adaptive Infrastructure was a sense of how HP has implemented the scalability of resources for front end, middleware, and back end database processing and how a cleverly set up SuperDome system with multiple cells, processors and memory can flex with demand, order level, web traffic and database calls dynamically. Old school "more blades" thinking reminds me of Scotty on Star Trek, throwing in more crystals and hoping that it holds together through the attack. The new scalable resources mode seems a lot more elegant.
The other connection made for me was the similarity to Amazon's EC2 cloud based service - exactly the same notion of allowing developers to have a variety of images or templates for highly tweaked configurations - to be called up at will - allowing production and dev sites to be resident on the same hardware.
The final wrap-up with the business case from John Pickett told about a customer that had 30 different OS variants/patch levels/versions deployed - each reduced into an image template that salvaged original investment in code - but allowed the savings in energy costs and maintainability.
The difference, though in responsiveness and control and speed has got to be major. As soon as we can get the videos posted, I think you'll learn a lot, even if IT is not your career field.
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