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'Software-defined' IS just a passing fad: HP techie Fink Tank lays down law

CTO also drops hints about Memristor DIMMs

HP reckons this software-designed fad sweeping the storage world is just a swing of the fashion pendulum and we'll go back to hardware soon enough.

Commodity public clouds haven't attracted much enterprise work and HP's Helion is well-placed for that.

Martin Fink, the company's chief technology officer, presented HP's views at an investor conference last week and analyst haus Stifel Nicolaus' Aaron Rakers noted down what he said. In highlight form this was:

  • There will be a pendulum-like shift back to hardware by the end of the decade, with Fink referencing The Machine, Moonshot, 3D printing and Apollo liquid-cooled servers.
  • Memristor product viability was reached in 2013, 17 years after the research started.
  • Memristor DIMMS will be launched in 2016 and full Memristor production will be a 2018 story.
  • Less than five per cent of enterprise workloads have moved to Amazon Web Services type environments. HP sees lots of opportunities for its Helion cloud service that competes with AWS, Google and Azure for enterprise workloads.
  • An HP enterprise 3D printing technology announcement is coming in October, with products following soon after. Print time is expected to be reduced.

NetApp CEO Tom Georgens is singing off an anti-AWS/Google/Azure hymn sheet too when he talked at an investor conference last week. He said such cloud services were two to three times more expensive than self-built enterprise IT systems for mission-and business-critical workloads that depend on high performance and bandwidth.

He emphasised that security and manageability concerns mean running these workloads in enterprise data centres is better than moving them up to the public cloud. These are non-economic reasons for locating them in the data centre. The public cloud is insecure and hard to manage – which, presumably, means Helion too.®

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