The Cube - HP New Support Reality - Greg & Chris Tinker, HP with John Furrier and Dave Vellante

Greg and Chris Tinker, two identical twins who work for Hewlett-Packard as Master Technologists solving large customers’ IT problems, sat down for a remote Skype interview with SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier at the company’s recent event (full video below).

The hands-on talk started after Furrier provided some overall background, including the results of a SiliconANGLE Facebook poll about what companies want most from enterprise tech support.

The twins kicked off with a bit of info on what it takes to hold the title of Master Technologist and what the job involves: “you have to be good at what you do,” they explain, and that encompasses a very broad spectrum of areas normally associated with complicated multi-vendor environments.

Further into the interview, the two HP techies discussed the impact of different processes on infrastructure – ones that can eventually result in the issues they are responsible to solve. The first example the brothers provided was running a data integrity test on a multi-terabyte or even petabytes-scale database, which more often than not causes strain on the entire system, and is felt all the way down to the end users, who are connected to the corporate network in question.

One such situation they encountered, and were tasked with fixing, was a shutdown that was the direct result of a regular maintenance check conducted a couple of months after the unnamed HP client encrypted its SAN. Security is becoming a very big focal point in enterprise IT, and the cloud structure in particular they said, especially when it comes to end point security and data protection.

The interview encompassed a lot of different topics, all converging in the same field. Towards the end of the interview one topic discussed the challenges different sized companies face with their deployments: both technical difficulties, and the need to achieve return on investment.

For the rest of the talking points these two HP heroes managed to bring up in just under 30 minutes, check out the video below.