Comments on: HP Clouds – If IBM Can Do It Why Can’t We?

By: Cloud Droplets #28 Chillin Christmas in da Hood | IT Management and Cloud Blog

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 14:50:04 +0000

[...] How do you like these apples? [...]

By: John

John — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 11:50:45 +0000

Hey Dave,

“There are no “army of services architects, project managers, grunts along with crates of hardware and software” – this can be done with minimal architects,”

Remember this statement? How do like these apples…

http://www.thestreet.com/story/10453333/1/defense-dept-dives-deeper-into-h-ps-cloud.html

By: dave

dave — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 21:33:45 +0000

so let’s see if i get this correct – google provides a similar service – to the rest of the world. are you saying it’s not a good thing for DISA to provide a secure cloud service to their customers, they are an ISP? perhaps hp is providing this for free, i have no clue, if it were me i would provide it for free and have disa’s customers pay a fee per use – that would certainly me more profitable than hawking a bunch of boxes and non-propreitory software. as to whether the google IT is more cost effective -i would hope that to be true seeing that they get to spread their costs over the billions of people that can use their service whereas disa can only spread it over the 3 million people that protect our country

By: Jayadeep

Jayadeep — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 05:11:43 +0000

I am with you John – having worked for one of the companies you mention here, I know for a fact that simple solutions are always get sidelined when compared to the complex ones with a large potential for continous revenue stream. Labor is preferred against many automated solutions. So people should look to Google and Amazon for developing cloud solutions, not the big guys – see my related thoughts at http://jdp-jayadeep.blogspot.com/2008/07/amazon-s3-ec2-simpledb-sqs.html

By: James Urquhart

James Urquhart — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 05:00:25 +0000

Right on, John. There is no way a company with tens of thousands of employees will service such a high visibility account with 5 guys and a handful of product licenses. Nor will this grow organically (as Google most certainly has), HP will be looking for a few big-bang announcements of major project rollouts. Doing it “a server at a time” ain’t gonna happen–and that increases risk greatly, in my experience.

James

By: John

John — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:33:49 +0000

Actually Dave,

I do understand DISA a little bit. A while back I implemented a huge Computer Associates implementation that costs millions of dollars by a deal that was cooked in someones back yard (not me I was just engaged to do the services work).

If you want to research another “what DOD” doesn’t spend on IT look up “Telos and IBM in the late 1990′s.

Thirty years and I have never seen a minimal implementation done by IBM, CA, or HP for a large enterprise. My research indicates that DISA’s budget for 2009 is 1.2 Billion dollars. I guess when you say not a lot of money it’s all relative. Also saying that DISA isn’t buying anything and they are only paying a fee for service seems pretty silly – don’t you think. Just because they use contractors doesn’t mean that someone isn’t paying for it. Is HP doing this for free?

However, you are correct I do not know the facts and I can only go by my experience of dealing with large vendors like (IBM, CA, and HP). I would love to see the budget for this minimal services contract. If you want to post some facts to contradict my assertions I am all ears.

Bottom line Google is not running HP Blade servers and Opsware to manage their Cloud infrastructure and I’ll bet their infrastructure is a lot more cost effective than the HP DISA proposed implementation. IMO, implementing bloated proprietary software implementations proposed by IBM, HP, and CA are not the kind of clouds enterprises should be looking at withe the availability of todays new technologies.

By: dave

dave — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 12:42:51 +0000

It would be good if you were able to present all the facts correctly. There are no “army of services architects, project managers, grunts along with crates of hardware and software” – this can be done with minimal architects, pm’s and grunts. If you understood DISA you would realize that DISA does not have “lots of cash” – 80% of their spend is provided by the Services and Agencies that they support. Also, did you ever think that DISA might not be buying anything – perhaps this is a fee for service transaction. DISA is not in the business of buying hardare and software – they pay their contractors a fee for service for compute power