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HP Kills Off Utility Data Center 138

Posted by CowboyNeal from the whitepapers-to-obits dept.
pacopico writes "HP's much hyped and highly-regarded UDC system has gone the way of the dodo. The Register charts the technology's demise and points to the few other reporters who covered UDC's end. Spent some time at HP checking out UDC and am sad to see it go. Ahead of its time to be sure."
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HP Kills Off Utility Data Center More

HP Kills Off Utility Data Center

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  • These sentences (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Spent some time at HP checking out UDC and am sad to see it go. Ahead of its time to be sure.

    Have no subjects.

  • HP woes... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ndykman ( 659315 ) on Friday October 01, 2004 @02:58AM (#10402556)
    This is really unfortunate. This technology had real promise, and I hate to see cool ideas that have commerical promise being shelved in favor of...

    Okay, for what. Seriously, HP. What the hell. I worked for you as a summer intern in 1997 at HP Labs. I had a good job there. You had lots of smart people who cared. It seems like you had a future, you had plans. What happened to you?

    Is Carly is what happened? I'm sorry all the good people their have seem to been let go (laid off) or retired (instead in getting laid off). I feel bad that you couldn't stay.

    It seems to me you are hell-bent to take every chance you have and ruin it. You have a lot of riches in talent and idea, and you just seem to toss it away.

    Wake up and smell the air around you. You need everything you have to go toe to toe with IBM. Choice is good, remember that, and stop killing good ideas left and right just, well, because?

    I still have hope. I really do. But I'm worried, because the more successful IT companies we have, the better we all do.

    • Re:HP woes... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 01, 2004 @03:03AM (#10402572)
      HP is going down the tubes due to a combination of Carly and the Compaq merger. The Compaq managment mentality has certainly taken over.

      If however you still want to work for a company where the HP idea and the HP way live on... head over to Agilent Technologies [agilent.com]. They aren't perfect, but it's probably a good thing for everyone there that they were spun off. It's also clear to anyone that has to work with HPaq or Agilent on a daily basis that Agilent is the only one of the two retaining any of the things that made HP a decent company.

      • Re:HP woes... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Jah-Wren Ryel ( 80510 ) on Friday October 01, 2004 @03:35AM (#10402641)
        HP is going down the tubes due to a combination of Carly and the Compaq merger.
        The Compaq managment mentality has certainly taken over.

        It is pretty well known that Carly replaced a huge chunk of HP management with Compaq management. I guess she was thinking that it would be a way to loosen up the inertia and make the company as a whole more receptive to whatever her grande plans are.

        But as someone who was, pre-fiorina, on the inside and now spends a lot of time looking in on HP from the outside on behalf of my clients, I'm hard pressed to think of a worse way to handle integrating the two companies. Best that I can tell, she took the very same people that were responsible for COMPAQ's death spiral and put them into position to do exactly the same thing to HP.

        I think the Hpod is a perfect example of this stupidity - HP's own LOGO has one english word in it, "invent" and yet HP did zero inventing with the Hpod. She and all the compaq deadwood seem bound and determined to make that logo (which was adopted under her reign) a lie by outsourcing all the inventing as well as manufacturering, etc.

        Oh well, at least HP is such a behemoth had she suck corporate blood for at least a few more years and the company will still have a chance of recovery. Just as long as she doesn't put a pistol to its head before she leaves.

        • Re:HP woes... (Score:3, Insightful)

          by murdocj ( 543661 )

          Best that I can tell, she took the very same people that were responsible for COMPAQ's death spiral and put them into position to do exactly the same thing to HP.

          It's weird, same thing happened to my company. We (and a bunch of our competitors) were bought out by a dot bomb that proceeded to loose somewhere in the vicinity of $150 million in 3 years. It was a pretty good trick, given they had bought a bunch of profitable companies.

          Then the whole mess was bought out by another company that was suppos

          • It's not a new thing. My Dad used to work for a feed company. They were a medium sized, but profitable company. Their nich: They would custom make feed for special purposes. With them you could test the grass, and have a custom supplimental feed made up. Include medicines, etc. They offered all sorts of standard high-quality feeds as well. They survived by being able to charge more for the feed, but the ranchers/farmers made more too because of superior growth. This was insured because the local ma
        • Invent on the HP iPod was pretty stupid. I think the point of the invent term was suggesting that HP products could be used in creative endevours, but with iPod being a pure entertainment product, it doesn't fit except for branding.

          I thought Compaq had some pretty good hardware and designs, and HP did too. I've had a Compaq SP700 dual Xeon 500, a Compaq W6000 workstation, I own a couple W8000s and a light Compaq business laptop. I've been buying the ATX-based DeskPros, which have been indispensible as l

      • Re:HP woes... (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        HP seems to be trying hard to kill everything of substance that they ever had in Carly's attempt to be a low-cost-Dell-clone company.

        No more PA-Risc [berkeley.edu].
        No more Alpha [infoworld.com].
        No more Itanium Workstations [osnews.com]
        No more open source [newsforge.com] (except for lip service)
        No more Bluestone software [informationweek.com] (based on open source.
        No more HPUX [derkeiler.com].
        No altavista when they bought CPQ.
        No more Vision [com.com]
        No more Hewlett Packard name [interex.org]
        No more Walter Hewlett [bizjournals.com] or Packard involved.

        Seems to me that last one triggered when it all started falling apart.

        • No more HPUX

          I aint going to shed any tears over that loss... Having worked with HPUX, I was quite relieved that we moved to Solaris, at the time that is.

        • Re:HP woes... (Score:2, Informative)

          by SDF-7 ( 556604 )
          "No more HPUX"...

          That link is just about 11.0 going into "support only" mode this year, and end-of-life in 2006. Hardly surprising since 11i v1.0 (11.11) has been around since 2000 to replace it... [not to mention 11i v2.0 for IPF and PA this year, with 11i v3.0 upcoming].

          That's like saying that MS has done away with Windows as a whole just because they want to stop supporting Win98.
        • Sounds like the disease that killed DEC, then spread to Compaq, is now chewing happily on HP. Sad.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:HP woes... (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Hobadee ( 787558 )
      I was a big fan of the HP/Compaq merger. I still think it was a good idea. HP's management pre-Carly/Compaq was getting a little too entrenched in old habits. (Basically, just playing it too safe - not taking nessasary risks) When Carly came in, she shook this up a bit - as was needed - however, she shook it up too much. I also find it funny how, when HP's (internal) merger fight was going on, Hewlett (?) was fighting against it because he wanted HP to go in the printing and imaging direction (consumer

      • Re:HP woes... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by AuMatar ( 183847 ) on Friday October 01, 2004 @05:05AM (#10402839)
        Working on the inside- the Compaq merger was aa hideous mistake. HP took its first quaterly losses ever as a result of it. The culture has died- forget about the HP way and the rules of the garage- we took Compaq's management, compaq's employee treatment, Compaq's raise and bonus system (we need to hit target numbers that they refuse to show us. Amazing how we never hit them).

        What did we get from it? Well, we became the numbebr 1 PC vendor- for 2 quarters. Dell then overtook us and has held it since. Not that we really got any use of it anyway- PCs are a commodity, we make barely any money from them in good quarters. Servers? We killed the Alpha, and we aren't doing so great in the low end server market. High end Compaq wasn't a comppetitor. Services? Our services division is yet to pull a profit. In fact, most quarters the only division to make a profit is the printer and ink division.

        Basicly we sold the corporate culture down the drain, fucked up the balance sheet, devalued the stock, all for nominal to no gains. Profits are the same as they were pre-merger, on twice the revenue. We're woring twice as hard to run in place. Hewlett saw the mistake she was making and tried to save the company, its too bad she bribed Deutchbank at the last minute to squeak through.

        This is why you don't put buisness and liberal arts majors in charge of an engineering company. They don't understand the buisness. So they turn it into something they do know- they move to compete in low margin commodity and consumer electronics markets like Carly has done.

        RIP HP. You were good while you lasted.

        • Re:HP woes... (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Spoing ( 152917 )
          1. This is why you don't put buisness and liberal arts majors in charge of an engineering company. They don't understand the buisness. So they turn it into something they do know- they move to compete in low margin commodity and consumer electronics markets like Carly has done.

          Some of the best coders and tech business people I've ever delt with were liberal arts majors. Grind your axe on another stone.

        • Re:HP woes... (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Distan ( 122159 )
          Hey AuMatar,

          It sounds like you are trying to hang in there. There is no disgrace in moving on. I was at HP for twelve years and thought I would be a lifer. I finally realized that enough is enough. I walked out the door and haven't looked back.

          The "secret targets" for bonuses was absolutely mind-boggling. The only time I saw a bonus from that scheme was the quarter before the merger, when she tried to buy our votes.

          Under Bill and Dave, profit sharing was "profit sharing". Any person with half a bra

          • Re:HP woes... (Score:1, Interesting)

            by Anonymous Coward
            HP has often shipped third-party products under the HP brand, and has also manufactured products for third party (even rival) companies to ship under their own brands.
          • One has to wonder what she has on the board


            Her mouth. 3 guesses as to what part of the board it's on, and the first 2 guesses don't count.
        • And you don't want to hear what my wife thinks of the last HP printer we bought. It seems that when you are printing sideways it unpredicatably (so far) inserts blank sheets of paper in the middle of jobs, making double sided printing impossible. We need to do this twice a year, so we're willing to go to a bit of extra effort to do so, but this...!!

          Copymat will be pleased with the new business.

    • I'm a tad slow on the uptake I suppose, but I read the article by Ashlee Vance at the Register and while she was trying to be cute and clever, she didn't really explain just what the hell the UDC was.

      Was it a server product? Was it a service? Was it an exhibit at HP ala Epcot Center or something?

      All I got from her article was that it was kinda cool, yet not really cool. Innovative, yet not really. Marketed yet not marketed. And that customers didn't want to buy it...probably because they didn't know exact

      • I didn't know either... (Score:2, Informative)

        by zogger ( 617870 )
        ...had to go look it up, so far nothing in the thread indicated what it was. It appears from a google search to stand for "utility data center" , some sort of universal server/data/format whosis that can be used on the fly, cross platform, washed the car, walks the dog, etc, all while providing enterpise level clients the rich experience they need in order to maintain customer satisfaction and increase profits...whatever. Maybe someone better in the know will take pity on us and give a better idea of what
        • That was always my impression too of the entire "UDC" sector. And if your product is too difficult to explain to the average manager, it's simply not going to sell.

          (My personal, mostly uninformed, take on it is that it was a way to lock customers in to HP-only solutions while sounding "open". IOW, same wolf in a different set of sheep skins.)
      • I thought this was funny too. The article talkes about this being hyped for years. As someone that buys HP and works with a lot of large HP customers I would have thought I would have heard of this before. All news to me. http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=UDC turns up three hits, this one and two that seem unconnected.

        If a business plans falls in the woods and no one hears it, does it create a loss?
      • Utility Data Center (UDC) was a combination of software and hardware designed to be extremely agile in forming new network topologies. The idea was to be able to point to any N machines and network attached storage devices, and physically rewire them into a new network topology appropriate for some problem. When the task was complete they would be put back into the resource pool to be allocated to the next project.

        Many of the software and hardware parts of UDC will continue to be developed even after the
    • What technology *is* UDC, exactly? I followed a couple of links but couldn't find anything to explain why I should want it.
  • While it may be gone, it won't ever be a total loss as long as HP learned something from it. Maybe something about more cost efficient technology, or maybe being more wary of the hype that comes with shiny new things.

  • To bad they don't just rerelease it as OSS. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 01, 2004 @03:12AM (#10402589)
    It's to bad to see technology like this die.

    I know it's not going to happen, but it would be nice if HP would just release it as open source software instead of just letting it die off.

    That way they could stick a couple designers on it, who would otherwise probably be fired, and see if anybody would like to pick it up. (hint hint Redhat)

    The reason stuff like this tends to go, IMO, is that even though it's good software, nobody is in the position to pay for something that they don't need. However by letting people play around with it and modify it to suite their specific purposes there is a chance that new life could be breathed into it and then HP would be in a possition to benifit from it, since they are the people with the most expertise with the software.

    Of course that sort of thing is very unlikely, but I am just sayin'. You know?

    • Re:To bad they don't just rerelease it as OSS. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I know it's not going to happen, but it would be nice if HP would just release it as open source software instead of just letting it die off.

      You forget that HP is so opposed to open source [newsforge.com] that it appears to have walked away from it's $470 million (what they paid) open-source-based software group [informationweek.com] out of fear of offending their proprietary software vendors. I think they'd sooner sign over the patents to MSFT than release it as open source.

      • HP also released substantial chunks of OSS to support printers. HP printers, for sure, though the code can be reused for other printers if anyone cared to do so.

      • Re:To bad they don't just rerelease it as OSS. (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        How was this modded interesting. Bluestone was never open-source, and it got canned because it could not compete against the app server offerings of BEA, Oracle, IBM, Sun and MS. It was too little, too late for HP.

        And HP has a Linux division, it has major contributors to the Linux kernel, it open-sourced some of its code (with the wrong licence (GPL) but for good reasons IMO (to avoid creating yet another licence)).

        Don't kid yourself with IBM. IBM is helping Linux because it is a good way to attack it

    • Re:To bad they don't just rerelease it as OSS. (Score:4, Informative)

      by AuMatar ( 183847 ) on Friday October 01, 2004 @05:08AM (#10402846)
      Not going to happen. We went from supporting OSS somewhat to having to jump through 5 levels of management to release anything. We wanted to release a small programthat was totally tangential to our main buisness and had no competitive value- we couldn't. Even to USE open sourcee officially requires 3 or 4 levels of managers now (if you do so officially- most of us don't bother to).
    • I wish there was a legal requirement that "abandonware" be automatically converted to open source. There's no cost to the company really, just stick a tarball on an ftp site.

      In cases like this, it allows customers to fix and upgrade to meet their own needs and preserves their investment. Over time, this could shift some of the balance in purchasing decisions away from big companies that are seen as stable and supporting their products for the long term over to more bleeding edge risky companies. Some c

  • Sounds like Loudcloud? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yeah... great idea, just like loudcloud was. Of course companies would rather not have their own data. Heck, they the whole outsourcing trend suggests they don't want their own employees either; so why not put all your data somewhere else. Personally, what I think killed these ideas is that everyone trusted their corporate data to gmail accounts.

    Not.

    Seriously, these ideas made no sense, because good data management is a competitive advantage that good companies have over bad ones. If you had a comp

  • Improper Marketing (Score:3, Insightful)

    by foobsr ( 693224 ) on Friday October 01, 2004 @03:39AM (#10402647) Homepage Journal
    In the end, it was the massive price for a UDC installation that culled "the vision," bucking the age-old adage that customers will buy anything with a fancy enough ribbon.

    Translated: "Marketing was incapaple of addressing potential customers properly, after being reluctant to finance research on the issue".

    CC.
    • Also the technological challenges were significant, with no real solutions to the problem of large scale resource allocation. I've heard them talk of a 'magic number' of machines they could manage (3000? - they were closed mouthed about it) before the system was unworkable. They're vision was for 50,000, but they were mostly focused on a economically inspired centralised managment system, which wasn't gonna scale, IMHO. The technology behind 'Utility computing' (HP) (or 'Autonomic computing' (IBM) or 'grid
  • I forget, do we like HP or hate them? Or do we like them but hate Carly?
    • I feel nothing....
    • Dislike but still hope.

      "It used to be such a fine company! Nowadays they try really hard not to be evil, but they fail hopelessly. We wish them best of luck at their attempts, but for now, I HATE YOU, I HATE YOU, HP!"
    • I think we like the memory of what HP was, and hate what it has become. Every division has suffered.

      Their PCs, printers, and servers are all a shadow of what they were. Feels like the entire line has been taken over in quality by the Presario line. They've replaced all-in-ones with units that don't have a fourth of the capabilities. New PCs that break in odd ways and their support has no documentation for (machines labeled 'HP Compaq' on the front). Bad news all around.

      Sad to watch a former tech lead

  • Nice company motto (Score:5, Interesting)

    by r_j_prahad ( 309298 ) <r_j_prahadNO@SPAMhotmail.com> on Friday October 01, 2004 @04:29AM (#10402761)
    So this is what HP means by "Invent"? In just a few short years, I have waved sayonara to their medical instruments division, their measurements division, OpenMail, MPE/iX and the HP3000 line, and now UDC. Not to mention tens of thousands of people, many of whom I used to work with.

    I'm too depressed to continue. I only wish our country had the balls to fight treason like this.

  • There are people behind the technology (Score:4, Interesting)

    by descubes ( 35093 ) on Friday October 01, 2004 @04:29AM (#10402763) Homepage
    Several comments lamented the loss of a great technology. I couldn't care less. There are men and women behind this technology, several of them close friends of mine, and that's the real problem here. For them, obviously, but also for HP. HP loses a really large pool of talented engineers. That's another great blow to the morale of the engineering community at HP. If something like UDC can go belly up in a matter of weeks, who's next?
  • I predicted this would happen. Everyone - including myself - believed that UDC had massive potential. It was just never marketed the way it should have been. HP's engineers are top-notch and have developed stellar products, but their execs never put too much faith in their innovation and only catch on when other products from other companies of the same kind become successful. By then, it's too late.

  • As an IBM On Demand consultant (Score:4, Funny)

    by LinuxHam ( 52232 ) on Friday October 01, 2004 @06:15AM (#10402974) Homepage Journal
    Thanks, HP! ;)
    • On CNBC, a brief blurb, which frankly is astonishing given the relative secrecy IBM pursues.
    • This discussion has disintegrated into HP bashing and has not at all commented on whether there is business need for a utility/on-demand/adaptive architecture. What's really driving it? Taking cost out (shared resources) or business agility, virtualisation and globalisation. Where would you place bets on this and what are the implications. And one of the players I think are creeping up on the quiet are Cisco. Huge market share. IOS creeping ever up the "stack" and obviously distributed, secure, servic
      • This discussion has [..] not at all commented on whether there is business need for a utility/on-demand/adaptive architecture

        That's because most /.ers would have no idea what we would be talking about if we had that discussion here. I've said for years that if there's a place on the web that's like /. but attracts more (employed) IT consultants and folks in the trenches than high school and college kids, I'd like to know where it is.

        Yes, while we have forged a great relationship with Cisco (I consult at

  • Wake up and smell the coffee (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Mr_Silver ( 213637 ) on Friday October 01, 2004 @06:28AM (#10403009)
    Yes it's a shame it has been killed off but had you read the article you would have seen:

    Hard as it to believe, HP's grand wrapping of the smartest severs, storage, networking and software products on the planet could not find enough buyers.

    So it was good technology, but they couldn't find enough buyers. So it was losing money. What do you propose they do with technology that no-one wants to buy? Keep it running and losing money just because it's "cool"?

    You bitch about the music industry and their outdated business model yet it seems like this technology has an equally flawed one too (that is, no-one wanted to purchase it). Yes I'm being harsh, but unless I get any more facts I'm inclined to believe that Carly killed it off because it was losing more money than it was making.

    Microsoft have enough cash in the bank to allow nearly all of their departments to make money - not everyone else has this luxury.

    • Re:Wake up and smell the coffee (Score:5, Insightful)

      by birder ( 61402 ) on Friday October 01, 2004 @07:08AM (#10403129) Homepage
      They couldn't find enough buyers because it didn't do what buyers wanted. They deviated from the design in 2.0 compared to what 1.x promised. The first release had some good stuff that just need a bit more management around. Then in version 2 they went a different direction.

      We listened to them but there was no way we would of spend millions buying into UDC they way it was turning into.

      What it boiled down to is the stopped listening to what customers wanted to began tell them what they needed.
      • What it boils down to is the business models are flawed.

        Customers are led to believe costs will be lower in a UDC/ODC. However, think about it - the hosting company has just taken on all of the risk of hardward procurement. To cover the risk, it has to be baked into the costs. Otherwise, what happens if you board a customer who has very low utilization? They don't pay much, and you can't recover the cost of the hardware. Thus costs are higher, and it violates customers' expectations - they dont sign. Furth
  • Ahead of its time to be sure.

    I believe this is a common thread throughout much of HP's history. Handheld computers, electronic survey equipment, desktop laser printers. HP has been a company that produced wonderful new products. I think cancelling some of them before the market developed, to watch someone else fill the void, is probably part of the history too.

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