HP equipment and why we like it
In our blog this week I thought I’d tell you why we use HP equipment (Hewlett-Packard ) and why currently we see no reason to change that any time soon.
A few of the old timers here at First Stop IT used to be involved in electronics. We used various HP © test equipment in our jobs, from multi-meters, power supplies, function generators, oscilloscopes, LCR bridges etc., we found them very reliable and accurate.
When I moved into IT, HP had released their LaserJet© laser printers. Working with these HP printers, I learned they also had that same reliability and added durability needed for our customers.
In the early days I found I could just about send anything to them and they would handle all the print commands without issue. Given the opportunity to install printers for clients today we still strongly recommend they use HP LaserJet printers in their offices. HP offer anything from the single printer to the full MFP printer with scan to email fax etc. We have even used the portable HP printer range to help clients that need a print any where mobile solution.
As you would expect with a tier 1 supplier like HP, 3 year warranties are available on business equipment. The merger between HP and Compaq© just added to the reason to add them to our PC approved hardware list.
The business grade PC’s we prefer to use today can include out of the box solid state drives, ready to go easy recovery partitions, ready to encrypt hard drive support in bios, simple connection to image centres, and recovery media. To the non-technical, that might not sound like much, you would be surprised how many manufacturers do not offer that service as standard. Trust me, when customers need these features they really are not happy with the delays related to these features being missing.
The merger also eventually brought the advent of standard ILO© (integrated lights out) on the HP servers this simply was a tremendous remote tool for our engineers. Giving us the ability to access servers that were turned off. Again great value for money, reliability and durability for our clients.
Looking back now it seems odd that the ability to turn off the electrical power and turn it back would be such a great thing, I found in the early days of my career that this was a great feature to have.
The vast majority of the work we do on corporate networks involves making changes to user accounts/access or server maintenance. ILO is an integral requirement that allows us the access to the server independent of the operating system running on the server. In today’s security conscious environment we occasionally have clients that need to allow workers from remote areas. Workers in locations that the hardware may be vulnerable to and also in areas where environmentally conditions dictate, HP offers a thin client. These devices offer a very cost effective method to meeting these solutions and have even made use of the ability to remote support and ship in a plug and play configuration. The user can open the box and turn it on ready to work avoiding an engineer having to be on site to setup a new machine. From a support perspective we still believe HP equipment provides a strong, reliable hardware platform, for ours and our customers’ requirements.
Over the years we have deployed hardware in a variety of sites around the world. With each installation the solutions are based on reliability and durability. We Believe our customers have come to understand reliability is often more important than simply a cheaper project cost, we prefer reliability to cost.
Don’t get me wrong, we fully understand there has to be a balance. However, we focus on the goal of the project which normally ends in overall profitability (three to five year ROI) and uptime, not simply the project rollout cost, thus avoid supplying cheap or unreliable solutions.
If you would like to upgrade your business hardware to HP equipment give us a call. We’ll be happy to discuss helping you find the best solution for your business.
Call us on 0345 450 7876 or use our contact form here.