HP Location Discovery Services on G8

New G8 Servers, not available as yet but some exciting new features...

I've been out of the game for a week or so due to holiday, but boy did I miss some exciting announcements. Unfortunately, my time out wasn't spent in Las Vegas for HP's Global Partner Conference but given the choice I'd love to have taken a look at the new G8 systems which were announced.

HP didn't spend a great deal of time boasting about new hardware features, however this might have had something to do with Intel kicking their heels with an announcement on their new line of E5 processors.

None-the-less, features were announced. 150 of them to be exact, all created on the back of extensive research carried out by HP through engagement with their customers. My favourite of these is the 'Location Discovery Services'

Location Discovery Services gives the server a sense of location within a new HP iSeries rack, gathering details such as U location, power, and temperature data.

Compiling detailed server information can be a real pain in the backside for admins, having to feed this data back to boring spreadsheets. A real time, auto - populating data stream could be just what the doctor ordered.

I'm unsure as yet of the ship dates of the HP G8 boxes, I have heard rumours that it could be as early as next month.

Is the tablet really a PC?

Say yes, you'll make Apple happy...

I've seen lots of bits and pieces on twitter and other social networking sites this week claiming that Apple have wiped the floor with HP, pushing them into second place and that they are now the #1 PC manufacturer. Does it really count though?

Apple sold 15 million iPads in the 4th quarter of last year. In comparison, they sold 5 million Macs giving them a total market share of 17 percent (nearest competitor was HP with 12.7 percent) I'm not certain of  HP's tablet to 'pc' ratio but I'm willing to bet that it's no where near Apple's 25/75% split.

For me, there's still a couple of areas where the tablet is at a disadvantage to warrant being compared directly to the PC, couple of my big groans:

Print Support - Unless your updating or syncing, a tablet like the iPad for example is attached to nothing. Yes, certain updates have been made to allow wireless printing but that's about as helpful as a chocolate fireguard if you've only got a USB printer!

Multimedia - Ok, so the iPad doesn't support flash but some tablet O/S do - Android have integrated it into their last couple of releases but it's nothing like the experience I get sat infront of my notebook, it's like the O/S picks and chooses its way through which sites it will and won't let flash work on!

Windows 8 tablets are due later this year with support for Intel, ARM and AMD chips. I'll be interested to see if any provoke a change in tides...