Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elwood P. Dowd who wrote (1627)	8/8/2002 3:12:17 PM
From: The Duke of URL©	Respond to of 4345

From the Great Mu who now seems to be a better source than Rona Barret: The Daily Burton - the Storage Market By Adamson Rust: Thursday 08 August 2002, 12:03 RIGHT WHEN IT PLANS its 90 day review after taking over Compaq, HP is getting well cocky about the storage market, according to information partners get but the INQUIRER only sees. HPQ says it expects an explosion of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) from IBM, EMC, Dell and others but reckons it's dictating the ground rules for the still lucrative market, according to sources deep inside the firm. For example, it appears that EMC is hitting the HPQ storage people with said FUD but the lads and lasses in the HDD biz reckon this is because they're "frit" now. EMC – tee hee It appears HPQ had an internal dialogue for some years asking itself whether EMC was a good firm to compete with or just an arrogant firm with some advanced technology. But now HPQ reckons EMC is in meltdown from the XP512-Hitachi platform and Shark at the high end and old Compaq down there at the dirty end of distributed storage. In fact, HPQ Burtonville reckons EMC is an acquisition target, maybe by Dell – sheesh! What a corker! Why. Well, EMC introduced the Symmetrix 8230 48-disk CLARiiON killer two years after killing the 32-disk 3630, and just a few weeks after then Dell gets the CLARiiON. EMC taking over Data General was a big boo boo, the boys and girls in Burtonville reckon. Nor is there anything new about EMC's vaunted "move to software" – course HP flogged EMC Symmetrix between 1995 to 1999 and has been saying it's moving to software all through that time. Yes. We well remember being outside Grand Central Station with HP a few years ago when they dumped EMC and the poor lads and lasses at EMC in the UK suddenly had their swipe and access codes to HP premises stopped, without notice. Widesky, reckons HPQ Storage, is a cunning EMC plan to mix platforms between storage competitiors but the trouble is that ex-Compaq, Sun and HDS can't make it work. Sun has quit the strategic alliance, HDS and EMC are in litigation, and ex-Compaq has more or less said: "bugger WideSky". EMC might only do just over $5 billion in their current year, the HP Fudsters reckon. Still, where would HP be without Hitachi Data Systems (HDS). Read on... Big Blue – boo hoo While Big Blue's Shark is wresting back market share from EMC at the big tin end, it's still struggling to be a storage firm, the HP Fudsters reckon. First of all, claims HP, IBM's mid range storage offerings come from LSI and Storagetek is LSI's favourite partner. Nor is Shark as good as the XP512, says Mandy-Rice Burton, and not even as good as EMC's Symmetrix, being built with AIX and bin tin arrays with dual quad RS/6000 app servers and only 347MB write cache. It only uses RAID-5, apparently. And HPQ reckons it uses SSA on the ass-end. Despite the fact that all prelates and palatinates bow to SSA, apparently only Big Blue uses and makes such disks. And Big Blue flogging off its HDD drive biz to Hitachi is just the thin end of the wedge. It got out of that biz cos it was losing money and now its storage will be much more expensive, the Fudsters reckon. The HP Fudsters think Big Blue will only sell their high end and midrange storage into IBM only shops. Dell – fsking h*ll Dell is a box shifter without peer, reckon the girls and guys in Burtonville, and its storage is so cheap that it would drown out a 10,000-bird flock of canaries. Unlike HP, it don't spend anything on R&D, the custom chips storage needs, nor software. CLARiiON is Dell's only way out, even though in the last three years Mikey D bought Convergenet, intended to propel Dell into the thick of the storage wars. But Convergenet warriors appeared to wear woad for a while and wave sticks with nails embedded in them around for 18 months and then all the staff departed for wars new, the HP Fudsters reckon. Dell now markets, distributes, supports and even makes CLARiiON with only R&D left. Dell won't do the R&D for the CLARiiON range, the HP Fudsters reckon, so who the heck will? Sun, Sun – not much fun According to Burtonville, a small village which has the Porcupine as its local hostelry, HPQ doesn't want to kick the Sun folk while they're down, probably because the CEO, Carleton Fiorina, is a caring sharing granny. Sun has seen its storage revenues drop from $2.5 billion in 2000 to $1 billion in 2001. The Sun storage gravy train is truly derailed, reckon the HP Fudsters. The A7000, claims HP, doesn't work after two years even though it's supposed to be the jewel in Scott McNealy's storage teeth. And Sun now flogs the HDS 9660, the Hitachi Data prod that HP does too. But HP OEMs it, while SUn simply resells it. [Does that mean putting a "Diversity" badge on the front? Ed.] That means the storage engineers aren't doing anything very much and HPQ Fudsters reckon the Sun-HDS relationship is close to setting. Then there's the departures like Zander, Hamley, Lehman and Shoemaker to consider. [Haven't you had some departures of your own HP, Ed?] Analysts – up their bottom Wow. This is brave. HPQ Fudsters say analysts can't tell the future any better than anyone else, but apparently the prevailing view in Burtonville is that folk working selling storage know a little more about the market than any analyst ever could. Check out this Burtonism: "If the HPQ merger turns out to be a success, the analysts will all claim they supported it right from the beginning." Hacks FAQs They're just an irritating boil on the body corporate... µ HPQ SAID it had named Bob Schultz VP of the HP Network Storage Solutions marketing team. They blagged Mr Schultz from Adaptec, but before that he worked for Compaq.

To: Elwood P. Dowd who wrote (1627)	8/8/2002 3:18:05 PM
From: Oeconomicus	Respond to of 4345

Miles to go before we sleep... better. ;-)

To: Elwood P. Dowd who wrote (1627)	8/8/2002 4:21:01 PM
From: PCSS	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4345

HP Applies Inkjet Technology To Cooling Chips ...And Proposes A Robot Engineer To Monitor Datacenter Heat By Mark Hachman of Extreme Tech ................PART 1 of 3 There's nothing more refreshing on a hot summer's day than a cool stream of water—and that goes for chips, too. On a balmy day at the company's headquarters in Palo Alto, Hewlett-Packard research engineers disclosed new methods of keeping both semiconductors and datacenters cool. What's novel is the way they are doing it: adapting an inkjet printer head to spray a fine mist of liquid on an overheating semiconductor, and using a mobile robot to look for "hot spots" in a data center. "We believe we have to take a holistic approach to cooling," said Chandrakant Patel, principal scientist and principal researcher on HP's thermomechanical research team at HP Laboratories. "We can not say we are going to cool the chip and not the data center." Patel is expected to make a presentation on the importance of data center cooling at Intel's Developer Forum the week of Sept. 9, labs researchers said. Mist for microprocessors HP, a company that makes billions on its inkjet printers, is exploring adapting an inkjet-like cartridge to deliver a fine mist of fluid onto the chip. Engineers are exploring whether it makes the most sense to spray the mist onto the chip package, or the surface of the chip die itself. "What we're proposing to do is take the cartridge right over the silicon chip," said Cullen Bash, a member of the technical staff at HP's System Technology Department. Fluid will be sprayed from the cartridge to the chip…then there will be a pump which will pump this fluid back into the cartridge." HP believes that in the near future, chips could dissipate 200 watts of thermal energy – heat – in a space an eighth of an inch on a side. That's because CPU's don't dissipate heat uniformly. In a microprocessor, most of the available space is actually cache memory, where instructions are stored. The computations take place in the arithmetic logical units (ALUs), where heat is concentrated. "And those heat sources will move around," Patel said. "The difficulty is targeted cooling." At the chip level, the problem isn't the overall heat produced by a chip, but the heat density. Although Intel CTO Pat Gelsinger first noted publicly that upcoming chips could produce more heat per square millimeter than a nuclear reactor, HP engineers said they first began thinking about the problem in the mid-1990s. Like a car, when chips overheat, they malfunction. Commercial-grade chips can generally tolerate temperatures up to 100 degrees centigrade. But heat can be a problem both in tiny spots on a chip as well as the ambient air swirling around banks of processors. Today, computer and silicon makers use several different ways to cool microprocessors. Most common is a heat sink or heat spreader, a metal attachment to a microprocessor package that passively dissipates heat across a wide surface area. "Finned" heat sinks use vertical plates to add even more surface area, and fans can be clipped onto these as well. In notebook PCs where heat is even more critical, "heat pipes"—thin tubes containing liquid—passively ferry heat away from chips through evaporation and recondensation. Some firms also sell water pumps that expedite this process, cooling the chip further. Bash said that HP found that a finned heat sink (also called a "thin fin") dissipates between 30 to 35 watts of heat. Evaporative cooling can dissipate up to 100 watts, or heat densities of 200 watts per square centimeter. HP eliminated heat pipes as an option because the water can boil inside of them, destroying the convection process. "The only reason we would consider this is the limit of the heat pipe itself," Patel said. "The (thermal) interface is the problem. We would try to change that interface."