HP blows up data center

In what is a blatant advertisement for its products, HP makes a cool demonstration of its failover server technology by blowing up a data center.

The technology demonstrated in the video is used by more than a few companies, including Google. Essentially what happens is when a data center goes down, the load is immediately transferred to another data center so that, to the outsider user, it seems as though nothing ever happened.

Most companies can’t afford this sort of system, but thankfully, data centers don’t go down very often.

HP reduces number of data centers from 85 to 6

In the increasingly competitive IT industry, companies are always looking for ways to cut costs. Three years ago, HP embarked on a plan that is has recently completed to reduce its data center locations from 85 to 6.

No doubt a lot of system admins lost their jobs as a result of the change. HP reports it cut its IT expenditures in half from 4% to 2% of their annual budget. For a company that earned £71.4 billion ($118 billion USD) in revenue last year, that’s a lot of money. Whereas before 70% of the technology budget was used for maintaining old systems, 80% now goes towards implementing new innovations.

The tech giant is currently working with other companies to implement similar cost-cutting schemes, all of which involve HP hardware, of course. It would be great if these huge savings were passed on to customers, but I’m not holding my breath for anything.

Source | eWeek.com