Adventures of a Technical MasterMind

I attended and spoke at HPSU this year. It was a good conference, and HP is making a lot of progress on the products which we are very interested in. I'm going to go into each of these and explain some of what I saw, and what we are up to with each product. HP NAS New UI is coming down the road. Additional of bare metal provisioning. Internally We are moving from 7.0 to 7.2 here in the next few weeks. We are just finishing up a MS-SQL Multimaster setup with the UK this week. It's been painful, and taken us 4 attempts now, but we are close. HP SAS Some interesting stuff with other customers, best practices, and other tips on it. Internally We are moving towards a small SAS deployment in 2008, probably 200-400 systems. Just firming up some budgets, since we are splitting the cost among a couple budgets. HP OO Tons of new content, which makes OO above and beyond. Multimaster is coming down the pipe, which should be really nice. Since the platform of OO is very similar to N...

I'm at HPSU this week. I will summarize the great stuff happening over here this weekend when I'm back east.

I'm giving a talk at HPSU on our conversion off OVIS onto BAC, BPM, and Sitescope. Should be pretty good, and straightforward, it's taken a while to get it all baked and integrated, but things are progressing well now.     Are any readers planning on attending the show? It would be good to hear from you guys who are, and we can meet up. Thanks!

I like what I see from HP RUM, my issue is that the pricing and model for it don't work in a shared environment. I can't nail down each application, webserver, application server, or environment. I prefer to deploy it at the edge of the datacenter and just use it as needed. This is how we deploy and use our current real user monitoring from Coradiant. HP has been trying to be flexible, and create a pricing model that works for us over the last 6 months, but we haven't made the kind of progress that I need to see.     We can't test or deploy a solution which isn't cost effective compared to what I am getting from my current vendor. I don't want to POC the product if it doesn't make financial sense. Hopefully at HP Software Universe we'll make more progress, and enable us to test the product. Ultimately the solution is very compelling and fits nicely with our usage of Business Availability Center (BAC) and related products.

I have a couple of short term tool replacements we are gearing up to normalize toolsets across the company. We are a HP NNM shop, and we've decided to finally get rid of it, due to the numerous problems we've been dealing with over the past several years. The amount of work that this tool needs is immense. This is why HP is doing a ground up rewrite of it for 8.0. We can't wait for it, since its not mature enough. We are implementing IBM ITNM (Formerly Precision). We are also going forward with enhancing our event management by using IBM Impact. Both of these products will provide a lot of value for us in terms of efficiency and increasing the effectiveness of the event management layer we already use from IBM. We are also looking to get HP SAS in for a small install which will scale out. It's looking like 400 systems to start with. More on that as we nail down the project and timelines. More on the HP side, we are also looking to scale out HP OO and start usi...