HP crafted a clever attention-getting for its current marketing campaign: they basically blew up a small datacenter. Why? Well actually it wasn’t just to start an arms race with Mythbusters. They suggest that if your company uses HP networking and server products, you will also magically be able to withstand having a bomb hit your datacenter. If you plan for it, of course.

Link to video from HP

What else can we take away from this?

• HP’s new spin on going Green: fight energy-users with explosives
• If you use HP products, you may want to blow them up too!
• HP has a lot of extra money that they would rather not invest in R&D and driving sales (this could be argued either way, but as a stockholder I don’t think I would be happy with a company that wastes its own products).

Regardless, HP did have some success because tech bloggers and writers around the world are talking about it. From a logical perspective, I don’t see this being a very effective marketing pitch. Any network, regardless of specific manufacturer, can be made redundant. Especially if you are carefully planning for an exact failure at an exact time. The challenge in the real world is to build redundancy on multiple layers, while weighing costs and benefits to create a network setup that is as redundant as possible from human error, geographical locations, complexity problems and hardware failures.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 9:00 am and is filed under sysadmin, humor, news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.