I imagine I'm going to be downvoted for asking this, but isn't this an extremely bad idea that is going to pretty much just bankrupt the HP server division?
actually an internal source that I contacted told me that Cisco and others have been doing the same for years, and also that after registration you'll be able to get most of the firmware and software for consumer and servers, but not for storage (or network).
But just to be sure I downloaded today the latest stuff for my N54L..
It hardly impacts the customers these big corporations focus on (mostly other big corporations).
I won't go into all the arguments pro and con this change but, suffice it to say, companies that have HPUX/AIX/Solaris/etc servers and cannot afford a support contract anymore are probably better served by other offerings (Linux, BSD, etc) running on less expensive hardware.
People will probably say "HP server division will die now because of this". While it's likely HP/Oracle/IBM's server divisions are not cash cows anymore, this is unlikely to happen. Just as with mainframe, it's part of IT optimization and using the right tool for the right job. Mainframes aren't gone, just hidden away in very specific areas. These proprietary Unix behemoths will go the same away... and the hidden areas they will be used at can afford the support contracts.
Overall, nothing new happening here. We are just going to repeat all the arguments again for why it's such a good/bad idea.
I think you're exemplifying my point. Any company that has enough resources to buy a System z mainframe, can also afford to have a support contract and thus won't be bothered by HP/IBM/Oracle's decision to hide firmware updates behind a pay-wall.
Perhaps I should have phrased it "RISC machines" instead of specifying the OS they run.
One fault in my argument is that HP sells smaller x86 machines, not only RISC behemoths. So the small customer that bought an HP server a while ago, ran off the warranty period and cannot afford a support contract, is royally screwed. Even here, this go back to my argument: these people are not who HP/IBM/Oracle are focusing on so they couldn't care less.
Cisco has been doing this for years, yes... but cisco is very dominant in the network hardware space. HP is not nearly as dominant in the server space, and it's not just market share HP server kit and Dell server kit is interchangeable in ways that cisco networking kit and juniper networking kit is not.
Except any "real" customers of HP have enterprise service agreements (or longer warranties) which include all this, by chance and bad fortune they have thrown the N40L into that bucket which happens to used by a lot of people for personal home server.
I doubt it. I have some Dell PE2900s that haven't had a firmware update in years. The last one wasn't even necessary but since they were turned off I figured might as well do it. We have some new proliants that have been powered on for 500 days. Since these are production servers it's assumed all the major and middle bugs have been worked out before they are sold.
Also, you are getting support contracts. Typical server timeline is paid support for 3 years, production for 5. In between you'll be adding or migrating to newer servers anyway.
What it's going to do is decrease the resale value of off-lease HP server hardware, which will lead to higher leasing costs, which will push businesses to buy elsewhere...
A current warranty is enough for access. On top of that, lots of their business is probably from people that want the support contract anyway. I imagine that covers at least a slight majority of their customers.
As a consumer I sometimes wish I could pay someone to get newer version of the FW on various devices. On the other hand FW is a crucial part of the devices and I should not have to pay extra for that.
I've had a support contract on an "enterprise-y" machine before, and that still didn't mean I got firmware updates. Just because you're paying doesn't mean that you get anything extra.
Specifically, I had a sun workstation (dual socket AMD) and it was originally advertised as quad-core compatible. I had a support contract for it (it was < $100). The firmware to make it support quad-core AMDs never came.
Word was that Foxconn (who actually built the motherboard) wasn't happy with the poor sales, and didn't want to spend the money on more firmware engineering. I donno how much of that was true, but it left me with a 60 pound box that could only hold four cores (and no power management).
That was my first thought, crackers will be glad about it.
Not only can they publish torrents targeted at the sysadmins willing to pirate the updates, they can also setup fake websites that look legitimate and offer them for free.
Yep, HP made it a policy to sign all their vulnerable firmwares. The procedure remains the same: please print this document to commence firmware upgrade. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRGEnakrx9o
I think it'll be more along the lines of people posting on forums "have model X mobo, can someone give me a BIOS image?" and others answering their requests, not unlike what already happens today in repair forums.
Not hard to dump the BIOS from a known-good board and flash it into another; it's the usual way to recover from a flashing operation that went seriously wrong, and any decent repair shop will have the reader/writer hardware for this.
A motherboard doesn't target a particular operating system for the most part, it targets a set of standard interfaces. If a motherboard is capable of booting Windows 7 it should be fine booting Windows 8 as well. In practice these interfaces have bugs, your motherboard probably has dozens if not hundreds of obscure bugs which violate specifications like ACPI causing sleep not to work right or similar issues. Often times these bugs are just for corner cases that weren't exposed in development with a particular OS and a different OS might depend on a particular part of whatever spec that the BIOS implementation doesn't quite get right. It can very well work fine the way XP does things but not the way Vista does but this would still obviously be a defect in the BIOS.
One interesting case many years ago was a particular motherboard that had broken ACPI support only in Linux so suspend wouldn't work. The motherboard would explicitly look for if the computer was running Linux and if it was it would hand it a mangled ACPI table that didn't work. The fix was to actually delete any code specific to Linux and have it give the Linux kernel the same ACPI table it would give to Windows and it suddenly worked perfectly. Obviously that's a problem with the BIOS and even though it said it implemented ACPI it didn't implement it properly. It worked fine for Windows but not Linux. You can certainly get more obscure problems going from one Windows version to another as well.
I had a feeling this was coming long ago. When I download support packs from HP you do a little store checkout for 0.00 before you can download. It would take no effort for them to add a few digits to that download process and turn it into a full fledge store.
So v1 is buggy, because sales numbers need to be up and its rushed to production. However, sales Q3 is down, so let's charge for "added functionality" (aka bug fixes) on the shit coming out the horse. Old trick, same crap.
Clearly HP is not giving a shit about its end customers, they do not want to sell servers as its more profitable to sell IT services. I will not shop HP the next time.
ahh yes, exactly what the world needs. another excuse for servers to not have the latest patches and service packs. as if it wasn't already bad enough.
Why would HP choose to do this? Is it really likely to increase revenue?
I can't imagine many customers without a support contract now getting one purely for firmware updates - they'll just ignore them.
So perhaps a few extra sales from people who really need the bug fixes. But at the expense of at least a loss of goodwill and increased hassle for legitimate customers.
I had a thought about this that a lot of growing economy are using second hand kit to run vast virtualised environments, HP could be trying to shut the door on people buying old enterprise kit instead of their shiny new ones?
That sounds plausible. For the most part though I'd expect those users to just use the old hardware anyway, so it's not a loss of revenue. And I'm sure the resources used to serve the updates wasn't significant.
> I can't imagine many customers without a support contract now getting one purely for firmware updates - they'll just ignore them.
I believe this is more widespread than you might think – many places are looking to cut budgets and if you have in-house staff who handle most of the work support contracts are a glaring line on your budget. It's not just about the customers who did drop support but also those who might be considering doing so in the future.
> So perhaps a few extra sales from people who really need the bug fixes. But at the expense of at least a loss of goodwill and increased hassle for legitimate customers.
Agreed: this is classic management-by-spreadsheet encouraging short-term thinking. I remember a few microcomputer and NAS vendors trying the same thing before going bankrupt, selling the business, etc. because everyone involved recognizes it as a shakedown operation. At multiple employers we switched to more ethical vendors specifically in response to moves like this.
In both cases it is software which is specific to hardware sold by the same entity which made the software. There is no way anyone else except the company’s customers could benefit from the software, and the software is necessary for the hardware to operate correctly, but the company sees fit to charge extra for the software anyway.
Of course, no analogy is perfect, but those are the commonalities I see.
Well to make another imperfect analogy then, would you feel the same way if your car manufacturer wanted $2k for a firmware update to fix the bug where your breaks stop working?
As GP said, and OS and board firmware are not the same thing, and equivalences are silly.
> In both cases it is software which is specific to hardware sold by the same entity which made the software.
The only thing that makes OSX Apple hardware-specific is that Apple put a check to try to prevent it from being installed on hardware they didn't produce. I can install OSX on non-Apple hardware just fine via hacks. I can also install OSX 10.9 on any Intel Mac that has the horsepower to support it.
Firmware is specific to a set of revisions of a specific board. I can't use N40L mainboard firmware on an N54L and vice versa. I may not even be able to use the same firmware on every board inside those lines.
> the software is necessary for the hardware to operate correctly
OSX is absolutely not required for Apple hardware to function correctly. I can install Linux and Windows on any Intel Mac, and Linux on any PPC Mac.
> Of course, no analogy is perfect, but those are the commonalities I see.
The analogy is shit. I can find commonalities in blue whales and elephants, but they are very different creatures. Firmware is a set of instructions for a special-purpose controller in a specific circuit. Software is a set of instructions for a general-purpose computer of a certain architecture.
Used to charge. For the OS, not for service packs or firmware updates, at least not in all the years I'm aware of (since I switched, in 2008). And now the OS is free.
This assumes that people will continue to "upgrade" their hardware at roughly the same rate they do today. My sense is that 10+ years ago we leveled-off on the order of (1GHz, 10GB RAM, 1T, 1Gbps, 100W, 1 core). (Sure, the last 10 years has given us a small factor improvement across the board, a bit more with power and disk, but it's not really a game-changer). HP probably believes that people will be sticking with older hardware much longer, which means they can't subsidize the ongoing work of software updates with new equipment purchases any more.
Or I could be completely wrong and HP is trying to boil the frog in the same way banks do with their fee structures. Either way, it doesn't seem like a smart move in the absence of a compelling "if we buy server boxes, they better be HP" story.
> HP probably believes that people will be sticking with older hardware much longer
I really hope this is the case, and that a sustainable update model means I can reasonably expect multi-decade lifetimes for utility grade systems. My main concerns would be lock-in, and process changes that artificially create a need for continuous updates.
The lack of BIOS upgrades is very rarely what kills a box. I have seen many boxes still in production that are more than a decade old. a good friend has a 10 CPU sun enterprise server from the first dot-com; He conned some poor ISP in davis into hosting it for him for $50/month. I'm certain that he is causing their power bill to go up more than $50 every month.
That's the thing, though, today, I could give him 1/10th of a server that uses 1/10th the power, and he'd have more compute resources.
That's the primary thing that kills old servers; It's not that they die (They become less reliable, but if it's good stuff and it's treated well, it's still 'good enough' for people willing to use "the cloud") What kills old servers is that newer servers use dramatically less power per unit of work done.
I've had many discussions about how to monetize old hardware; a favorite idea is to set up some sort of "distributed grid computing" service in cold climates, where the servers are all older, but they run in buildings that would otherwise be electrically heated, making power costs zero.
(I mean, there are lots of problems with the idea; it's not getting past the purest of fantasy stage, but it was fun to think about.)
This kind of anti-customer move will only help initiatives such as open compute and companies that rely or want to develop this technology under that route. HP feels to me like it's going down hill.
67 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadIt hardly impacts the customers these big corporations focus on (mostly other big corporations).
I won't go into all the arguments pro and con this change but, suffice it to say, companies that have HPUX/AIX/Solaris/etc servers and cannot afford a support contract anymore are probably better served by other offerings (Linux, BSD, etc) running on less expensive hardware.
People will probably say "HP server division will die now because of this". While it's likely HP/Oracle/IBM's server divisions are not cash cows anymore, this is unlikely to happen. Just as with mainframe, it's part of IT optimization and using the right tool for the right job. Mainframes aren't gone, just hidden away in very specific areas. These proprietary Unix behemoths will go the same away... and the hidden areas they will be used at can afford the support contracts.
Overall, nothing new happening here. We are just going to repeat all the arguments again for why it's such a good/bad idea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_on_System_z
> just hidden away in very specific areas
Like every single Financial Institutions on the globe...
Horses for Courses... asking a steeplechaser to do a flat race would be foolish, but each is exceptional for the task they have been bread for.
Perhaps I should have phrased it "RISC machines" instead of specifying the OS they run.
One fault in my argument is that HP sells smaller x86 machines, not only RISC behemoths. So the small customer that bought an HP server a while ago, ran off the warranty period and cannot afford a support contract, is royally screwed. Even here, this go back to my argument: these people are not who HP/IBM/Oracle are focusing on so they couldn't care less.
Even most of the Proliant range comes with 3yrs service/support/warranty so its only really the microservers which are really affected.
Also, you are getting support contracts. Typical server timeline is paid support for 3 years, production for 5. In between you'll be adding or migrating to newer servers anyway.
Specifically, I had a sun workstation (dual socket AMD) and it was originally advertised as quad-core compatible. I had a support contract for it (it was < $100). The firmware to make it support quad-core AMDs never came.
Word was that Foxconn (who actually built the motherboard) wasn't happy with the poor sales, and didn't want to spend the money on more firmware engineering. I donno how much of that was true, but it left me with a 60 pound box that could only hold four cores (and no power management).
Not only can they publish torrents targeted at the sysadmins willing to pirate the updates, they can also setup fake websites that look legitimate and offer them for free.
Especially easy considering the mess that HP support URL are.
Not hard to dump the BIOS from a known-good board and flash it into another; it's the usual way to recover from a flashing operation that went seriously wrong, and any decent repair shop will have the reader/writer hardware for this.
Some firmware fixes are for serious thermal issues or other problems which would result in data loss.
However this:
> That’s a hefty price to pay to fix what is arguably a defect in the original product
What a blatant lie. How can it be a defect in the original product for an operating system which is brought out months after release of the hardware.
One interesting case many years ago was a particular motherboard that had broken ACPI support only in Linux so suspend wouldn't work. The motherboard would explicitly look for if the computer was running Linux and if it was it would hand it a mangled ACPI table that didn't work. The fix was to actually delete any code specific to Linux and have it give the Linux kernel the same ACPI table it would give to Windows and it suddenly worked perfectly. Obviously that's a problem with the BIOS and even though it said it implemented ACPI it didn't implement it properly. It worked fine for Windows but not Linux. You can certainly get more obscure problems going from one Windows version to another as well.
So perhaps a few extra sales from people who really need the bug fixes. But at the expense of at least a loss of goodwill and increased hassle for legitimate customers.
I believe this is more widespread than you might think – many places are looking to cut budgets and if you have in-house staff who handle most of the work support contracts are a glaring line on your budget. It's not just about the customers who did drop support but also those who might be considering doing so in the future.
> So perhaps a few extra sales from people who really need the bug fixes. But at the expense of at least a loss of goodwill and increased hassle for legitimate customers.
Agreed: this is classic management-by-spreadsheet encouraging short-term thinking. I remember a few microcomputer and NAS vendors trying the same thing before going bankrupt, selling the business, etc. because everyone involved recognizes it as a shakedown operation. At multiple employers we switched to more ethical vendors specifically in response to moves like this.
Also we are talking about servers here and not a desktop OS.
So what's different? Everything, we are not even talking about the same thing.
Of course, no analogy is perfect, but those are the commonalities I see.
> In both cases it is software which is specific to hardware sold by the same entity which made the software.
The only thing that makes OSX Apple hardware-specific is that Apple put a check to try to prevent it from being installed on hardware they didn't produce. I can install OSX on non-Apple hardware just fine via hacks. I can also install OSX 10.9 on any Intel Mac that has the horsepower to support it.
Firmware is specific to a set of revisions of a specific board. I can't use N40L mainboard firmware on an N54L and vice versa. I may not even be able to use the same firmware on every board inside those lines.
> the software is necessary for the hardware to operate correctly
OSX is absolutely not required for Apple hardware to function correctly. I can install Linux and Windows on any Intel Mac, and Linux on any PPC Mac.
> Of course, no analogy is perfect, but those are the commonalities I see.
The analogy is shit. I can find commonalities in blue whales and elephants, but they are very different creatures. Firmware is a set of instructions for a special-purpose controller in a specific circuit. Software is a set of instructions for a general-purpose computer of a certain architecture.
Whether or not you buy another HP server is an interesting question. Dunno; this is kind of a dick move on HP's part, and not a great sign.
Or I could be completely wrong and HP is trying to boil the frog in the same way banks do with their fee structures. Either way, it doesn't seem like a smart move in the absence of a compelling "if we buy server boxes, they better be HP" story.
I really hope this is the case, and that a sustainable update model means I can reasonably expect multi-decade lifetimes for utility grade systems. My main concerns would be lock-in, and process changes that artificially create a need for continuous updates.
That's the thing, though, today, I could give him 1/10th of a server that uses 1/10th the power, and he'd have more compute resources.
That's the primary thing that kills old servers; It's not that they die (They become less reliable, but if it's good stuff and it's treated well, it's still 'good enough' for people willing to use "the cloud") What kills old servers is that newer servers use dramatically less power per unit of work done.
(I mean, there are lots of problems with the idea; it's not getting past the purest of fantasy stage, but it was fun to think about.)
The newer stuff tends to be denser and easier to manage, which further reduces rack space and meatware cost.
http://www.softpanorama.org/Hardware/HP/ILO/#Fiasco:_some_ad...
Intel confirmed some time ago that HP is on the decline, while SuperMicro and others are on the rise:
www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/09/29853/
We'll just make it barely function and the poor sap who doesn't notice any problems untill the waranty runs out will just have to pay for support.
Wonder if you could sue or ask for a refund if the hardware doesn't work and it's clearly their fault.
Aguably they were selling defective hardware that they refuse to fix from now on. That would be a fun argument in court.