Talking Cloud with HP in Singapore

HP APJ invited us to Singapore to attend their media conference about Cloud Computing. We’ve been here since Monday listening to talks about HP’s enterprise business (sorry, no consumer electronics here) which mainly focuses on storage and cloud services.

Cloud Computing is something we’re all familiar with but mostly on the end-user perspective. We just know it works and they’re cool — GMail, Google Docs, DropBox, Siri and the rest of the gang. What happens behind the scenes is something we’d probably all take fro granted.

The media event for press the bloggers here at the Marina Bay Convention Center showed us how it works in the background, from a business and technical point of view. It’s actually just a one-day event for the media so the second day is dedicated just for bloggers attending a lot of nose-bleed technical seminars and site tours.

Cloud Computing is one of HP’s biggest business and it’s still growing. In one of the presentations yesterday, a speaker from HP mentioned that their servers do a lot of hard work.

I also heard that HP is doing an auction of the original Blade servers that powered World of Warcraft to give the proceeds to charity. Found the story at Battle.net here:

Want to own a piece of Blizzard Entertainment history? After a series of World of Warcraft infrastructure upgrades, we’ve preserved the retired HP server blades that once hosted many realms in our archives. In the near future a selection of these blades will be made available for auction, and the net proceeds will be donated to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

HP also invited some of their AsiaPac partners that uses their solutions and the guy from SingTel mentioned their planning to make Singapore an Intelligent Island with optical fiber up to 200Mbps to the home (and there’s some cloud computing component to make that work).

The rest of the talks were a bit cloudy to me but we eventually went to the HP Cooltown Innovation Center in the afternoon where they showed us how the whole thin works from the business, financial and technical stand-point.

We couldn’t really take any photos but the presentations were really cool especially the ones with Augmented Reality in them.

More technical seminars await us today and a tour of Singtel’s Data Center but if you’re still interested to learn more about them, just head over to the PC Labs section for updates later in the day.