Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

HP Unveils Mini Workstation

www8.hp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 238 posts

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#141

Post by SwellJoe »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #25

Tangent: I'm curious about HP's hostname taxonomy. I.e. What products or content live under www8 vs www2 or www7. http://www8.hp.com/.. .

I did some caching/content distribution/load balancing work for HP many years ago (maybe 10 years ago, now).

The names are (or were) geographic and divisional. Their infrastructure is (or was) pretty old school. While they do have load balancing and such, it is often of the form of redirects based on locality or other information. People in Hong Kong or China starting on HP.com in the US would find themselves bounced over to servers in Hong Kong, based on their language and where their traffic was being routed to/from. They mirrored tons of their data automatically with Squid proxies and just additional web servers. So, once a user gets directed to a local HP site, they'll tend to stay on it...and if content doesn't exist in the local cache, it'll pull it from the origin. HP has tons of public server names not just in the wwwN.hp.com space.

So, while I don't have specific information about www8 vs www2, etc. Based on my own experience with their infrastructure, I would assume it is the most boring explanation. They need several servers to provide good service, so they just give various divisions their own servers. This was the case in Hong Kong, Korea, and China, where my work was deployed. They do have load balancing and content distribution and such (and did even back then), but the actual web services were pretty traditional; they just ran on a server somewhere.

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#142

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

cmdrfred wrote: post #77

I've deployed a hundred or so HP mini's pro units processionally, utter garbage. Blurscreened constantly, took 6 months of screaming at their tech support to get them replaced. I can't recommended any HP product after that.

I've got an HP Stream Mini, which I've been perfectly happy with[0]. Granted it's not a business machine and I don't do any dev work on it, it's just my living room HTPC. But I totally dig how easy it was to open up and replace the wifi card, hard-drive, and memory. In fact, my only complaint about it so far is that I stupidly let it update to Windows 10, and now I periodically turn my TV on expecting to be staring at Kodi, but instead I get a login screen because W10 decided to install updates and reboot on me.

[0] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/02/cheap-functional-upgr...

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#144

Post by matt4077 »

mrpippy wrote: post #80
kogepathic wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has to. 135W power supply for a device which is 8.5x8.5x2.3" There's no way that much heat is going to be quietly removed by those tiny fans. I'd love some high res photos of the inside so I could look up the data sheet of the fans in use. Considering HP servers ship with cooling ducts to direct airflow and this thing doesn't even seem to have them. I mean look at the CPU exhaust! From the photos it looks like the…

From the pictures it looks like the power supply is external

Power supplies are around 85%-95% efficient I believe, meaning that more than 100W of those 130W end up as heat in the case no matter what.

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#145

Post by intrasight »

rch wrote: post #125
intrasight wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had really meant to say "not enough good mini/laptop options"

Fair enough. My main ergonomic requirement for a workstation is zero noise at rest, and reasonable otherwise. I'm interested in seeing what I can get in form factor though.

My goal as well. I think that I assumed (wrongly) that these small form factor computers would be more quiet than a tower.

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#146

Post by ilaksh »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #41

See also the Intel NUC thing: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/nuc-kit-nuc6i7kyk... What really astonishes me though is how you can have these really nice machines and Apple doesn't bother to update the Mac mini. Seriously, an Apple version of this would be a nice desktop.

Also see larger but still small and powerful Gigabyte Brix UHD.

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#148

Post by rikkus »

Matthias247 wrote: post #93
Slackwise wrote: post #24

> The HP Z2 Mini was designed for the millions of CAD users demanding smaller hardware I'm not a CAD user, but is there really a "demand" for smaller desktop hardware?

That's also what I'm wondering. For my primary work PC it's: Either it's really portable and has a screen - then it should be small. Or it's not portable - then I don't care as long as it fits on or under the desk. For some environments however small or invisible hardware and the associated clean look is definitely a bonus: E.g. if it's a PC in your living room (I bought a NUC for that), or maybe for publicly exposed…

On a 'living room' PC: I bought a Thinkpad T430s for £150. It's connected to the TV, the amp, and syncs various file storage services to itself then backs them up to various locations with Crashplan.

The best thing about it? If I want to do anything with it, I just open the lid. Screen, keyboard and pointing device built in.

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#149

Post by ChuckMcM »

Matthias247 wrote: post #87
daxorid wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the Skullcanyon NUC, and this is not comparable. I've been waiting for someone to offer me ECC in a small form factor. This is the first time I've ever seen it.

Just interested: What's your use case for ECC? Do you intend to run a server on it and aim for highest stability?

On my current desktop machine (32GB ECC DRAM) I see a single bit error (corrected) probably every 18 to 20 days. There isn't an easy way to tell where that error hit in memory (you could presumably walk it back from the physical chip to the physical address space to the current page table and then back into virtual space and a process but that is waaaaaaaay too much work :-) Without ECC those errors would happen and I'd keep working and they may or not cause a visible symptom. A schematic data base slightly corrupted when it was saved to disk, a Flash image that isn't quite right, a system daemon that crashes and restarts unexpectedly, etc. Not really something I want to take my chances on.

Of course if you don't have ECC memory you don't know that your memory is being silently corrupted. For some people they don't care, for me, I do.

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#150

Post by JustSomeNobody »

NetStrikeForce wrote: post #97
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad this doesn't have a built in hires display and a keyboard so we could compare orange to oranges.

I've been looking around my Mac Mini and my friend's Mac Pro for hours now. I couldn't find the hires display.

> ... when Apple switched to max 16 Gb of ram on their PRO line...

What PRO line do _you_ think he was talking about that is limited to 16GB?

Post reply on HN