What to Expect from HP Discover 2015

By John Monahan

Next week, much of the CTG leadership team will be on the road with HP, as we participate in our technology manufacturer’s key customer program: HP Discover.

From our experience attending for many years, this annual program connects CTG and our clients with HP’s top experts, who use this venue to introduce new initiatives, share insight on industry trends, and connect with visionary IT leaders from across the country.

As HP rightly bills the event, this is an “active, dynamic conversation.” Topics start with cloud, Big Data, security and mobility – and the conversation only gets deeper as HP engages with us on real issues that customers face with their technology in daily business.

From June 2-4 in Las Vegas, the program will explore more than 700 topics featuring thousands of experts from within HP and across the technology spectrum. It’s not an understatement to say that we have access to more information and insight in three days than we could in months; the program will cover some 2.25 million square feet of conference space. And the program is designed to help participants put conference learnings immediately to work. Whether you are looking for new ideas or best practices, CTG can help you connect with the right HP expert and product to find the answers you need.

As we discussed in an earlier blog post, being an HP Gold Partner gives CTG rare access to the manufacturer’s best people and latest technology. Our leadership participation at HP Discover 2015 is just one benefit of our strategic alliance with HP.

What you can expect from HP Discover 2015:

·         Leadership viewpoint: HP Chairman, President and CEO Meg Whitman will talk about the company’s latest strategy and initiatives.

·         Learning opportunities: The program will feature different training sessions to meet your different needs. Hands-On Labs, which run two hours, will give you firsthand experience with HP’s newest technologies, bringing in real-life scenarios, simulations, guides and training tips. HP ExpertOne Trainings are longer sessions that are scheduled to ensure participants can still attend keynote sessions and networking opportunities.

Too hard to pick out which sessions to attend? Check out HP’s recommendations for the top 5 “can’t miss” sessions for HP Converged Systems.

·         Technology innovations: Track keynotes will feature HP senior leaders speaking on emerging IT trends, HP’s point of view and strategy, and individual business initiatives. Panel discussions will include HP, customer and partner experts addressing the industry’s hottest topics. If that doesn’t deliver what you’re looking for, you can attend breakout sessions on the topics that matter most to you and your business or 30-minute sessions on specific business solutions. The Innovation Theater will feature 20-minute talks by customers and other experts on how innovation and collaboration can change business outcomes.

The HP Discover Insider blog will feature regular updates on game-changing innovations in enterprise software, hardware, services and networking. Keep visiting the blog for regular behind-the-scenes updates and insights.

Whether you are attending sessions in Las Vegas or will be participating via non-stop live streaming, know that our CTG team will be bringing the latest HP technologies and learnings back to Greater Richmond. As we prepare for the conference, let us know if you have any technology challenges or opportunities where we can help. We’ll be sitting at the table with the top nation’s IT talent, and we’re ready to put that knowledge to work for you.

John Monahan is a co-founder of Convergent Technologies Group.

Four Reasons the CTG and HP Partnership Matters

When a business comes to CTG and trusts us to provide an information technology platform to rely on every day, they are choosing our company for two critical components: our people and our partners.

We have built our company by finding young talent that believes in our customer-first approach and who are steady resources that grow with our client. But this is only part of the equation.

Equally important is that our team has developed critical partnerships to implement the best, most reliable and flexible technology in the industry today. That’s why we decided many years ago – after observing and testing products from the majority of the top IT manufacturers – to develop a strategic partnership with HP, whom is currently rebranding this part of it's business as Hewlett Packard Enterprises. Our strategic recommendations are built first on HP platforms and software, and we tap into other partnerships to meet specialty niches.

While you’re right to think that we’re a little biased about the high quality of HP at this point, we aren't the only ones. Just last week, the 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Modular Servers – always a highly anticipated market analysis – endorsed the Palo Alto, Calif.-based manufacturer as a “Leader.” At CTG, we firmly believe in HP’s self-assessment that it “offers a strong product portfolio and delivers the right compute for the right workload at the right economics.”

By building a relationship with HP beginning nearly a decade ago, we, in turn, can offer key benefits to our customers:

1.      Simplicity. Whether you have an in-house IT team or rely on CTG for daily support, building a platform that connects different elements from storage and servers to desktops and networking from the same manufacturer streamlines your everyday management and workload. HP allows us to develop a strategic architecture and implement a single console for your IT needs, whether you are a mom-and-pop operation or a Fortune 500 company. Not many manufacturers can offer that full portfolio, and our CTG team provides a single point of contact.

2.      Expertise. As an HP Gold Partner, CTG has access to the best computing minds at Hewlett Packard. We receive unique training and education on the HP product suite. If you have a question, we can easily find the right answer. This single-vendor strategy allows us to deepen our knowledge as we consult with our clients to find the products that match their needs. That starts with HP hardware and extends to HP software as well. And when you have a specialty IT need that is outside the HP family, we can bring in the right resource and use our expertise to easily integrate it with your HP platform.

3.      Reliability and Innovation. Each is as important as the other. HP delivers products that are durable and carefully designed to meet evolving business needs. Of course, you want to know that you can trust your IT systems, but you also want to be ready to take the next step forward. We have seen firsthand that once HP releases a new product, it is already is back in the research and development lab, looking for enhancements to make that product even more efficient and effective – and to launch innovative new products. Our CTG team serves as a bridge to keep you running smoothly today and scaling up with new technology as your business grows.

4.      Value. Leveraging our knowledge of the HP product line, we can quickly assess your needs and recommend the best technology that delivers the best bang for your buck. In an ever more digitized economy, our clients are looking for the smartest solutions that allow them to best serve their customers. But IT budgets aren't limitless, and our HP relationship delivers a valuable win-win in the best firepower at the best price.

This is an exciting time to be working with the emergence of the Hewlett Packard Enterprise division. You will see the company putting a more complete focus on the data center. That means even greater R&D investments, better customer support, more product customization and a greater understanding of how technology intersects, drives and supports business strategies.

But don’t just take our word for it in this post. Give us a call – and we’ll show you the best that CTG and HP can offer.

John Monahan is a co-founder of Convergent Technologies Group.

Picking the Right Cloud

Last week, we discussed some common ground around what the Cloud should offer. Now let’s go with an analogy that I may just pile drive in to the ground by the end of this, but that I think is appropriate as we talk about types of clouds. And that is utilities. More specifically, let's talk power/electricity.

1. Public Cloud

Unless you live in the remote Western outback, odds are that you get electricity from your local power company.  You don't need to know how the utility company generated power or even how they delivered it to your home. You just know when it's there and when it's not. As a customer of cloud services, this works in a similar fashion.

You don't need to know, or totally care, about how your cloud provider's servers are configured, what the brand is, where they're physically located, or the name of the system administrators that keep it running. You will generally just care that it's there. Whether it's gmail/Google Apps, Office 365, or even if you are savvy enough to spin up your own servers on Amazon Web Services, you just don't need to know what is making all of that cloudy goodness happen. This is the public cloud.

However, if you’re a large enough company and are making a big move from housing your servers locally and onto the cloud, you'll be asking about all of the stuff most people don't care about when they use a hosted service.  For most businesses, though, it's more about brand recognition (Google, Microsoft, Amazon) than grilling potential providers about their infrastructure.

2. Private Cloud

A private cloud – which is generally used by large organizations with a well-qualified IT staff – is the equivalent (to return to our utilities metaphor) of running your own power generation operation.  

Using the same or similar technologies as the HPs, Googles, Microsofts and Amazons of the world, these businesses build out the network, servers, software and processes to deliver a similar set of services and characteristics internally. This is not for the light-hearted (or light-walleted) and very much like building your own power plant. The advantage is you get all of the benefits of cloudiness with all of the control that many organizations require or desire.

Just to add to the confusion, there is such a thing as a hosted private cloud, which may sound like it should be called a hybrid cloud, but it's not. You basically still run on a large cloud platform, but many more mechanisms keep your services separated from public services. You might need a VPN connection to get into your hosted private cloud.

3. Hybrid Cloud

No. This isn’t a Prius with a WiFi connection. That said, you have probably estimated that this combines public and private  cloud services. (In this case, private cloud is used as you've built your own in-house cloud).  This kind of setup offers the best of both worlds in that you can move services that may not be as critical  (or super secret) out to a Public Cloud provider and back as your own workloads require.  

Another common use of a hybrid cloud is for backup and recovery, as well as archiving.  Many companies today rent rack space in a data center, invest in another pile of hardware and set things up so that if their main office (or primary data center) were to have an issue they can continue to operate from that backup data center.  By deploying a private cloud and enabling it to talk and move services seamlessly to a public cloud provider,  they get a previously unheard of level of resiliency at a relatively low cost.

I almost forgot to whip out the power analogy (you know you would miss that). This is similar to having some solar panels that you use to cut down on your power bill a bit, but you still need the extra boost on a cloudy (pun intended) day and occasionally might even generate enough to sell back.  

4. Cumulonimbus Cloud

Ok, this isn't really a thing unless you're into the weather.   

I'm going to sign off for now, but I hope I've set us up with a common understanding of the cloud. Future posts will discuss different cases for the small, medium and large businesses, as well as myths and myth-busting.

In the next few weeks, our CTG team will be building our own private cloud, using HP Helion OpenStack on our Lab BladeSystems and 3PAR Storage. It's going to be a fun ride! Keep following us on social media to follow our journey.

Jeff Garell is a co-founder of Convergent Technologies Group.

Computing in the Cloud

Let’s start with the basics: What is the cloud? 

That's a really good question – but it doesn't come with an easy answer. The cloud means many things to many people, and you’ll often find the term used and abused by our industry’s marketing and advertising folks. 

To ground our discussion, let’s consider a common set of definitions, since this will be the first of many blog posts where we’ll be exploring the cloud, cloud services and where they might or might not fit in your environment.

So let's kick it off with a definition, ripped from Wikipedia.

Cloud computing is a computing term or metaphor that evolved in the late 1990s, based on utility and consumption of computer resources. Cloud computing involves application systems which are executed within the cloud and operated through Internet enabled devices. Purely cloud computing does not rely on the use of cloud storage as it will be removed upon users download action. Clouds can be classified as public, private and hybrid.

That clears it all up - thank you Virginia, good night!

Or perhaps not. Let's try to simplify this a little, but there’s no guarantee we won't get muddled up a little.

We should start with characteristics common to cloud technologies that carry across public, private and hybrid clouds.

Agility and Responsiveness are two words that you'll often hear cloudy sales people say. And while they sound kind of cheesy, when done correctly, they’re both absolutely  true. The ability to set up and tear down requested services – often via a self service portal – in a  matter of minutes (or an hour) is a big change to the monolithic change control process that many organizations have when requesting new services. 

CAPEX vs. OPEX is another driver for companies to move to a hosted (public) cloud solution regardless of their size. To dig a little deeper, CAPEX, or capital expense, is the use of your cash to buy physical things, such as servers and software.  As a business expense, you get to depreciate that spend over time.  OPEX, or operational expense, is what you pay to cover what it costs to operate. For example, a new copier is CAPEX, while paper and toner are OPEX. You can immediately write down OPEX instead of getting the credit over a multi-year period. Given that cash flow is king, many organizations prefer a monthly OPEX payment rather than a major CAPEX spend.

Scalability is another key characteristic of a good cloud solution. The ability to keep adding storage or compute power quickly and easily without having to re-engineer the whole thing is key to cloud provider growth.

Cost reductions are often touted as another reason to make the move, but this can be touchy. You need to conduct a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis to determine whether that will be true for your business. Cost should really be pretty far down on the list of reasons to go to the cloud unless you're hankering for some disappointment. When cost drives the cloud project, the results are often an under-provisioning of services (to meet a budget number) and unhappy end users.

Reliability and accessibility are another pair of words that those sales reps will toss out there without explanation. And once again, they're both enabled by the underlying architecture of cloud systems. Reliability comes in the form of hundreds or thousands (or, in the case of Microsoft and Google, 1,000,000 each of servers and the ability for various services to move seamlessly to a different physical server if one has a problem. Accessibility is delivered by having these services available on the Internet, which means if your office loses power, everyone can still work from home because the data is "in the cloud.”

Up next

Now that you have a framework for what a cloud and cloud computing can do for you, we’ll explore different types of clouds and how they could work in your business in our next post.

Jeff Garell is a co-founder of CTG.