Hey, I know you… when was the last time you heard that, and didn't remember the person who was saying it? It happened twice in a couple of minutes this morning as I was meeting a customer that I was briefing. Forsythe Technologies,[http://www.forsythe.com/na/] a channel partner, had brought in a bunch of customers, and I was getting ready to brief them on the HP IT Transformation.  One guy had seen a training video that I had done, so me not knowing him was a given. The other guy now works for Forsythe, but used to work for HP. Probably about 5 years ago,  I was delivering virtualization presentations as part of a tour, and he was a co-presenter on the same tour. We even flew from Toronto to Mexico City together, and what's more, he used an extra upgrade that was about to expire to get me into a business class seat.  Him,  I should have remembered!

Anyway, it was a great session, with lots of questions from the customers. The core idea of the HP Transformation is that we were spending >70% of our IT time and money on maintenance and operations - keeping the lights on. After 3 years, HP has reduced spending and HP is spending <30% of our remaining IT time and money on keeping the lights on - most of it is spend on innovation and upgrades to make HP more competitive.

One of topics I addressed is whether we use HP Integrity servers and HP-UX 11i in our internal infrastructure. Indeed, we do. While it may also be used for exception types of projects (ex. Mission critical environments that can't use our standard services), both our Shared Application Server and Shared Database Server environments utilize application stacking in HP-UX 11i, Serviceguard (and Serviceguard Extensions for RAC in the database environment), Virtual Server Environment, and more.

Why application stacking, with an average of 10 Oracle RAC or WebLogic instances per OS instance? Well, we believe that removing OS instances from the environment reduces the maintenance cost, even if it is a little harder to architect up front. And if you are trying to reduce your maintenance and operations costs from>70% of the IT budget to <30% of your IT budget, a little more up front work is worth it to drive down the maintenance costs. It does increase the uptime requirements, but that is what HP Integrity servers, HP-UX 11i, and Serviceguard were made for.