HP Pathways to Cloud Roadshow 2012

I spent the day in Dallas for the HP Pathways to the Cloud Roadshow, which is currently a few stops into a tour around the United States. As the name suggests, HP is making day-long visits talking about cloud technologies.

Why should you consider attending one of these events?

If you are an existing HP customer, this is a great way to get some face time with experts. You can also get questions answered about how your current IT infrastructure might benefit from expansion into some of the HP cloud technologies. 

You don’t need to be a current  HP customer to get some value from the roadshow. If you are an IT decision maker evaluating technology options for your company, the roadshow can help answer questions.

All of the content is framed around HP solutions, which makes sense because it’s their event, but at the same time, they are covering important issues around cloud security, networking, storage, and infrastructure that are applicable to many situations.

While not specific to cloud solutions, the segment of the event around Intel’s Sandybridge processor was a good reinforcement of things I’ve already read. 

Coverage of the Gen8 ProLiant servers was eye opening. Gen8 is certainly interesting because of the hardware upgrades over 7, but the level of automation HP achieves in monitoring and early warnings suggests they are commited to reducing the amount of time wasted by IT departments with needless troubleshooting. We all know servers are going to have issues over their time in production; HP put automation in place that identifies those issues at a more granular level and even isolates the problem so that monitoring is more meaningful.

One of the key things I appreciate about HP’s messaging is they are pushing open standards at every step. For instance, HP understands that while HP-UX is a great solution for some use cases, using Linux may be a better choice Using open networking standards allows their products to play nice with competitor offerings, rather than locking you into an all-or-nothing HP solution.

How can you attend?

Here are the remaining dates in the roadshow. If your company is nearby any of these stops, be sure to register and attend.

March 28 – Washington DC
March 29 – Chicago
April 3 – New York
April 5 – Phoenix
April 11 – Denver
April 12 – Cincinati
April 18 – Tampa
April 19 – San Francisco