...and things that go bump in the night, guid Laird preserve us, goes an old Scottish poem. Just the thing for Halloween, I thought.

And, in that spirit (pun intended), comes an announcement from Hewlett-Packard that it has launched What Haunts Your Data Center -- an education campaign featuring six animated data center characters that "bring to life the scary monsters that haunt IT managers' dreams."

I'm going to have to list the six to set this one up. They are: Dracula, the Data Center Energy Sucking Vampire; Frankenstein, the Multi-Vendor Environment Monster; the Blob, The Virtualized Data Center...Gone Wrong; Skeletons, Legacy, Unknown Server and Storage Hardware; Ghosts, The Spooks Haunting Unsecured Data Centers; and Werewolf, The Untrained Custodian.

Now, I have always been a fan of Swamp Thing and Killer Tomatoes -- where are they? What is this, monster bigotry? That aside, one has to appreciate the attempt to inject humor into what is essentially a marketing event, and to tie it into the cultural phenomenon of Halloween.

Still, I can't help thinking: Would nailing up cloves of garlic and upside-down horseshoes get rid of Vlad and the Werewolf just to even things up a bit? And are IT managers really afraid of the monster under the bed?

In any event, the marketing is slick. You can view videos of the monsters here on YouTube, or go here to download a PowerPoint presentation.

HP's leveraging social media too, having set up a fan page here on Facebook. And HP's destination site has lets visitors vote for their favorite monster and has "lots of good information on best approaches for ridding the data center of the monsters that haunt it." It also lets you go to a "haunted data center" with sound and visual effects.

Me, I want my mommy. NOW!