by Chris Purcell

This is my last full day at Tech Forum 2009 and I elected to split the day in half and send the morning in further breakout sessions and the afternoon on the exhibit floor. Energy was still high when I looked around attendees that were having breakfast, although starting the sessions at 8.00 am in Vegas was probably pushing it for some. Okay, off to the breakout sessions.

The first one I attended was HP Commercial Notebook overview hosted by Brian Allen HP (Product Manager)
Luggables to laptops to Notebooks have been with us for many years and have now become such a commodity I am not sure what we would do without them. I really enjoy my new iPhone but have still to master the tiny keyboard. What Brian updated us on today was the latest trends HP is building into it's commercial notebooks.

• HP notebooks are starting to offer Quad core chipsets into their mobile workstations
• Express Card is starting to replace old standards PC Card and PCMCIA
• Solid State hard drives are staring to emerge
• eSATA  equates to a really fast USB drive
• GOBI - a mobile module accepting multiple types of Sim cards integrated into the notebook
• The new Dream Color monitors, developed in association with DreamWorks. These displays have a highly accurate color engine that displays up to 15 million color – this is a amazing display on a notebook
• QuickLook2 feature allows a user instant (10 seconds) access to a cached version of Outlook without having to book the machine

Session 2 was Six Core AMD Opteron processor hosted by Travis Justilian of AMD
Travis walked us though AMD’s new chip offering (Istanbul) that released in early June and you can see them being offered in the new G6 HP ProLiant servers. The Istanbul chip sets have embedded Hyper Transport technology (HT) which improves processor through put. Travis’ analogy of HT was “it’s like handing the processor with a pair of tweezers so it can pluck out the exact data to process”

• AMD-P suite has AMD Power Cap technology and AMD Cool Core which allows certain parts of the chip to be cooled
• AMD has made a 14x performance gain from first chip in 2003 to where they are now with Opteron in 2009.

My last session of the morning was HP’s Adaptive Infrastructure Maturity model hosted by Russ Wagner
This was a really interesting session, but one that many people appeared to have missed. I liken AI being put in place to battle urban sprawl and trying to replace it with a Master Planned community. Datacenters rarely have the luxury of being build from scratch and as they grow as does the complexity of how they need to be managed. Urban sprawl is probably not the best term, but I think it illustrates the point. The value of Adaptive Infrastructure is to drive consistent building blocks across business enterprises to make them easier to manage and maintain.

Okay back to the session with Russ. AIMM (Adaptive Infrastructure Maturity Model) helps determine opportunities to decrease your IT costs while decreasing your IT costs while increasing overall data center efficiency. It is a well established process for working through a structured path to identify real value and opportunity. These workshops working with teams like Russ, take about 4 hours going through a 50 questions questionnaire. It’s worth taking a look to understand Adaptive Infrastructure better as I really think it is one of HP's best kept secrets.

As I mentioned earlier, I elected to spend the afternoon on the show floor, which for me was having the ability of discussing many of the topics I had heard about in the earlier breakout session and in the keynotes. It’s interesting to hear about new technology in a presentation, but even more interesting to see it in action. I had a chance to go back and visit Brian Allen and actually see the mobile workstation Dream Color display that was shows 15 million colors. Clearly worth a see (no pun intended). Also, something I had not mentioned earlier where the large format printer that HP also had on the floor. All very impressive. I got a chance to see the see the new ProLiant G6 product line, as well and the recently launched SL 6000 extreme scale out server.

The afternoon turned out to be a little mind numbing and could have used more time, but I really enjoyed myself.