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December 2, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- In an effort to consolidate and tighten up its IT infrastructure, a project other large IT firms like Dell have implemented in the past, Hewlett-Packard (www.hp.com) announced on Monday it has completed its three-year revamping initiative of its IT operations, removing $1 billion in costs out of the company and reducing its annual power consumption by 60 percent.
According to reports in The Register, Randy Mott, HP's chief information officer, has been able to condense the company's 85 data centers down to "a six pack of three redundant, highly virtualization data centers" over the past three years. The six facilities currently give HP a footprint of 342,000 square feet of floor space, with the ability to expand to more than double its capacity.
Mott, who joined HP in 2005, was behind Dell's massive internal IT consolidation project a few years ago as well, where he squeezed the company's 22 data centers into six highly-efficient facilities with room to spare.
Part of Mott's goals with HP also involved cutting down the company's server count from 25,000 to around 14,000. Although the exact number hasn't been released by the company, HP says it has reduced the number of servers by around 40 percent, which according to The Register, means HP currently has around 15,000 boxes.
HP says it has also cut its 6,000-strong application portfolio down to around 1,500 and became the first customer for its NonStop-based Neoview data warehouse product, which was introduced in April 2007. Through this part of the project, "HP has consolidated 762 data warehouses and data marts down to a single data warehouse running on a Neoware Neoview NonStop cluster."
Perhaps the biggest advantage to all of this has been the energy and cost savings Mott has been able to bring to HP. The company says it has been able to cut its networking costs by 50 percent while tripling network bandwidth and update its power and cooling requirements effectively enough to reduce its energy usage by 60 percent. This quite likely contributed to why HP was ranked at the top of the latest "Green Data Center" Vendor Matrix in October by ABI Research.
Not unlike other IT giants like IBM with its well-known "Project Big Green" initiative, HP has been working on popularizing its own Green Business Technology services as well.
In November, HP updated its Thermal Logic portfolio, adding power-capping server technologies and energy-efficiency services designed to reduce operating costs and extend the life of data centers.
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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