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Composable Infrastructure

What drives HPE Synergy and makes it Composable?

by Philip Sellers May 31, 2016

written by Philip Sellers

Last week, I posted about HPE’s Synergy Platform – their vision of Composable Infrastructure. My post had a hard slant towards the hardware components of the solution because that is the world that I generally live in. I received some comments about the post and I always appreciate that kind of feedback. I don’t always get it correct when I write and this is less about being right or wrong than not painting the complete picture. And in full disclosure, the two people I was talking with are not HPE employees – both were industry folks at other companies.

So, what did I miss in post one? Primarily, I shortchanged the software component of the solution and one friend pointed out, the hardware alone does not make this a composable or even software-defined solution. So, let’s dig a little deeper into what HPE has laid out during my briefings and see if I can’t paint a fuller picture.

Composable, driven by Software

The software that drives Synergy Platform is two pronged. I covered the Synergy Composer and the Synergy Image Streamer to some degree in the first post. The software is installed as a physical hardware module. Each module has a specific job and a specific application running on it, but they also work together.

As a recap, Composer is the management interface. Composer is able to manage a large pool of Synergy Frames [up to 21] and their connected resources. It is based on HPE OneView – also a management software – but it has been customized and extended for the Synergy Platform. Utilizing OneView as the base for the system gives Synergy an API to build upon.

HPE-Synergy

OneView is a strong management system built around server profiles. In OneView, you create a definition – a server profile – that includes all of the settings that get instantiated on the hardware. This metadata can include server settings down the BIOS, the network definitions, the storage definition, and firmware/driver levels. Profiles can be cloned and as of OneView 2.0, the idea of profile templates was added. Templates allow you to set definitions and then clone out individual profiles with different IP and names, but they retain the tie to the template. With templates, you may change a setting, like the networking configuration or firmware level, and then push out that change across all the profiles created from it. During the next reboot, these settings are applied. This is great for firmware and driver patching or for adding a new network uplink to a cluster of ESXi hosts, for example. All of these features are great for IT operations working with traditional IT infrastructure.

Synergy Platform, however, has goals beyond easing management of traditional IT. It is targeted at new-style IT or cloud-centric IT. So, building upon the base of server profiles, Synergy Composer takes the server profiles and adds some additional personality – and VMware administrators may see a lot of similarities between what Composer does and how Virtual Appliances work in vSphere. You can set IP and naming conventions for deploying systems in mass with Synergy – so Composer has to adopt these functions into its toolset – but it also adopts the ability to pass that configuration to the booting OS. So, what’s I’m rambling and trying to explain is that Synergy Composer encompasses the OS personality, in addition to the hardware personality. When I think of the OS personality – it is the ‘what makes each node different’ versus the hardware personality as the ‘what makes them the same.’

API & a different audience

One of HPE’s major goals with Synergy Platform was to expose everything available in the GUI management interface as an API, also. And beyond that, they wanted it to be as simple as possible to create and deploy an instance of compute. HPE’s focus here – I’ll admit – almost seems obsessive to allow compute to be created or torn down with a single line of code. Another major goal was to allow developers to call and create compute instances in their own language – in code – where they feel most comfortable. It is an appeal to a very different audience than the IT operations staff that HPE is normally catering to with their hardware solutions.

All of that said, the API makes it possible for forward-thinking administrators to automate and extend their processes into other systems. The API makes it possible to tie and automate server creation into the ticketing system, regardless of which vendor created the ticketing. It makes it possible to include these processes into scripted processes in enterprise batch solutions or anywhere else. It opens up an endless set of possibilities.

Streaming the OS

The OS personality is handled in conjunction with the Image Streamer. The streamer holds the golden master images of the OS that will run on the server profiles when they are deployed to compute nodes and powered on. The Image Streamer takes an OS image, presents it over iSCSI to the host, and then boots the system. While Image Streamer could do this for traditional OSes, it is not targeted there. The Image Streamer is intended to be used with stateless OS deployments – like ESXi hosts or container hosts. This means that the boot process needs to include a scripted process to fully configure the host. The settings for each instance is provided from Composer and the individual profile. vSphere offers very similar stateless ESXi with vSphere Auto Deploy. The difference here is that you’re using iSCSI to boot instead of PXE.

Cattle versus Pets

Very similar to how you view applications deployed on Docker, to realize the maximum benefit of Synergy, your compute nodes should be viewed as cattle and not as pets. For anyone not familiar with this analogy, here’s how it goes. In traditional IT, you view your servers as pets – your cat or dog. You know your pet by name and when they get sick, you take them to vet and you’ve have surgery to get them well again. But, if you were a cattle farmer with thousands of cows, you treat each cow differently. You don’t name them, though they might be assigned a number for tracking. And while you might give them medicine, you wouldn’t carry it to vet and give it surgery to make it well again. You’d likely shoot a sick cow and move on. Harsh, I know, but that’s reality.

The same thing is true when you change from traditional virtual machines to containers. With our traditional virtual machines, each one may start as a template, but once it is deployed, it deviates from that template and there is no relationship to it. If you need patches, you install the same update on each VM. On the other hand, containers have a limited lifetime. They exist to do a single thing. If it gets sick, you kill the process and restart new. If you need an upgrade, you don’t do those update steps against 1000 containers. You restart them from a new master image with the updates integrated once.

OS in the Synergy Platform will adopt the cattle mentality to realize the maximum benefit of the platform. The combination of the Composer and Image Streamer will allow IT departments to use the same mentality and benefits of scale that exist with containers at the physical hardware level with the container hosts, virtual hosts and with individual OS deployments.

Composer and Image Streamer gives IT the necessary workflow tools to achieve the vision of becoming a cattle farmer in the IT operations.

Traditional IT, too

Even though the vision and maximum benefit of Synergy Platform requires a change in how you view and operate your IT hardware, everyone in the industry realizes that all traditional IT is not going away anytime soon. The trick is finding a flexible solution that can provide you infrastructure for both traditional IT and cloud-centric IT. According to HPE, Synergy Platform can do this for IT.

Even though a lot of what makes Synergy different and composable is the Synergy Composer and Synergy Image Streamer, these two components can continue to run traditional IT systems side-by-side with the new-style IT.

Companies that adopt Synergy Platform will need to be somewhere down the transformation pathway for the solution to make sense. If a company is still engrained in traditional IT systems and operation, Synergy makes no sense to them. This solution is targeted and most beneficial to companies that are attempting to run both traditional IT and build new, cloud scale applications at the same time. Cloud scale is about agility and the time required to react to business needs. It is also about handling demands of a very uncertain or dynamic workload. It is about decoupling the applications into smaller and more-manageable pieces. For IT operations, managing both of these is a challenge. Managing both of these types of infrastructure in a single solution is compelling.

Final thoughts

Does Synergy Platform solve all of the management headaches of deploying traditional and cloud-scale? No. There are management headaches above the physical layer, but having a consistent platform for both at the physical level could be beneficial. All IT shops are faced with resource constraints the the more standardization, the better.

When moving to cloud-scale, one of the first conversations has to be ‘where do we have the most similarity and mass that it makes sense to invest in the workflow and automation that makes cloud-scale work?’ It makes sense to standardize and try to maximize the benefits. It is a large portion of the cloud-scale appeal and benefit.

Next week, I head to HPE Discover in Las Vegas. I fully expect to hear more about Synergy Platform and where it is in the release-to-market timeline. As an aside, I have not seen the interface and software actually running Synergy Platform. I saw some early concepts back in December at HPE Discover in London, but I really have not spent any time hands-on with the software. This is one reason I subconsciously avoided talking detail about it in the first post. I post what I know and what I’ve observed – not simply what I’m told by marketing folks [no offense to them]. I would really love that opportunity next week.

May 31, 2016 0 comments

Datacenter Storage

What is Composable Infrastructure and where is it targeted?

by Philip Sellers May 24, 2016

written by Philip Sellers

Last month, just before the flooding, I was onsite at HPE in Houston, TX, for a Tech Day focused on the HPE Hyper Converged and Composable Infrastructure portfolio. I have since had a chance to reflect on everything I had learned about HPE’s Composable strategy – and the larger industry direction of containers and orchestration are it is all taking us. There are potential benefits and lots of hurdles in both of these major initiatives in the industry. The reason behind these concepts and solutions is delivering faster results and flexibility for IT organizations. And while at the Tech Day, I was able to get dig in again and refresh what I’d heard and learn more detail around HPE’s Composable strategy.

What is Composable Infrastructure?

I’ve had the opportunity to drill into HPE’s and the broader industry definition of Composable Infrastructure a couple times in the past year. HPE released Synergy Platform last December at HP Discover in London. This was the first purpose-built hardware platform for composability, but the people I talked with in HP warned me that it would not the only platform.

Composability is the concept of being able to take standard compute, storage and networking hardware and assemble them in a particular way using orchestration to meet a specific use case. When your use case is completed, you can decompose and recompose the same components in a different way to meet new needs. Beyond that point, it also includes the concept of being able to do this with hardware on demand as your usage and requirements change throughout the day. For peak work loads, you may need to compose infrastructure to run a billing cycle and then decompose and recompose the same to be web front-end servers for E-Commerce during a peak usage – like Black Friday. The key here is orchestration and with the orchestration, speed.

In many ways, Composable Infrastructure provides a pool of resources similar to how virtualization provides access to a pool of resources that can be consumed in multiple ways. The critical difference is that these are physical resources being sliced and diced without a hypervisor layer providing the pooling.

Characteristics of Composable Infrastructure

HPE has a strict definition they are following for Composable Infrastructure. If any of these characteristics are missing, they will not classify a solution as Composable, no matter how close it may resemble it.

Unified API
- Single line of code to abstract every element of the infrastructure for full infrastructure programmability
- Bare-metal interface of infrastructure as a service
Software-Defined Intelligence
- Template driven workload composition
- Automation to enable streamlined operation of the system (HPE calls it frictionless operation)
Fluid Resource Pools
- Single infrastructure of disaggregated pools
- Physical, virtual and containers
- Auto-integrating of resource capacity

The API is straight forward, along with the ability to use templates to define and automate system builds. Fluid resource pools also makes sense if you’ve spent any time with a virtualization technology. The point that didn’t immediately make sense is the ‘frictionless operations.’

In terms of frictionless operations, what HPE is talking about today is automation and workflow tools within the management interface to streamline the upgrade processes required on the system. Those may include upgrades in the OS images and it may include firmware and driver bundles along with the management interface rollups.

Self-Healing Infrastructure

Now, take this concept & definition a step forward and layer on monitoring and mitigation software. What becomes possible is a self-healing infrastructure, reacting to events and remediating them on its own. Self-healing is a compelling concept, but so far attempts have been far from exceptional and its really tough to achieve. There is an huge amount of work required in standardization and orchestration that just don’t fit with traditional IT software and OS concepts. Where I say traditional, HPE is using the word legacy or old-style. They’re talking client-server applications – the commercial, off-the-shelf software so many Enterprises are running today.

But looking into the future, HPE can see that self-healing can be realized with cloud-native, scale-out software solutions. And it is betting that if it can build a physical infrastructure capable of programmatically assembling and disassembling systems on-demand, that is can power this self-healing future.

HPE Synergy Platform

HPE Synergy Platform is the hardware HPE believes will power the future of on-premises, cloud-native IT along with the flexibility to host legacy applications in the same pool of resources.

While examining Synergy Platform at Discover, I first noticed that the hardware platform looks very similar to a HPE BladeSystem chassis. It is different in the number of compute nodes and the dimensions of those compute nodes and the networking. But physically, it looks very much like a BladeSystem. What occurs quickly to you is that you have new capabilities like adding a disk shelf that spans two compute bays and provides a pool of disk that can be shared throughout a Synergy Frame (not called chassis anymore).

HPE-Synergy-with-Composer-Storage-Module-and-480-660-620-and-680-Compute-Modules_low

Compute

Blades become compute nodes, but the concept is much the same. The form factor does not change much – you have half-height and full-height options for compute nodes in Synergy. The dimensions are larger to accommodate a fuller range of hardware inside of the compute node. Starting with a half-height blade, HPE is offering the Synergy 480 Compute Node. It is a similarly equipped Gen9 server to meet similar use cases as the BL460c.

Another change in Synergy, the slots for compute nodes no longer restrict you to a single unit – there is no metal separation between the compute bays. You can do double width units in Synergy, in addition to full-height. HPE is making use of that with a double width and full height Synergy 680 Compute Node. The 680 is an impressive blade with up to 6TB of RAM across 96 DIMM slots and quad sockets. It is a beast of a blade. Other full-height option are the Synergy 620 and 660 Compute Nodes.

Composer & Image Streamer

Orchestration is really what sets Synergy Platform apart from the c7000 blade frames from HP. The orchestration is achieved by modules on the Synergy Platform management modules.

First, the Synergy Composer is the brains and management of the operation and it is built on HPE OneView. From an architecture stand-point, a single Composer module can manage up to 21 interlinked frames. Each frame a two 10Gig management connections – on a Frame Link Module – that can be link frames together. Each frame connects upstream to a frame and downstream to another and this forms a management ring. Using this management network, the Synergy Composer is able to manage all 21 frames of infrastructure. Although each frame has a slot for a Composer management module, only one is required and a second can be added in a different frame to establish high-availability.

Synergy Image Streamer is all about the boot images. You take a golden image, you create a clone-like copy (similar to VMware’s linked clones) and you boot it, when the image is rebooted, nothing is retained. Everything about the image must be sequenced and configured during boot. Stateless operation is very much a cloud-native concept – requiring the additional services to be deployed in the environment – like centralized logging – to enable the long-term storage of data from the workloads. Composer also takes into account updates and patching by allowing the administrator to commit these to the golden master and then kick off a set of rolling reboots to bring all the running images up to date. Just like Composer, the Image Streamer also only needs a single module or two for redundancy in two different frames.

Management in Synergy is made to scale and eliminate the need for onboard management modules and a separate software outside of the hardware to manage many units.

OS Support for Streaming and Traditional OS Support

At launch, Synergy’s Image Streamer supports Linux, ESXi and Container OSes with the full benefit of image, config and run. The images are stateless, meaning nothing is retained when the system reboots. Windows was not supported with the Image Streamer as of December. The Synergy and composable concept is clearly targeted at bare-metal deployments of cloud-native systems.

Now, even though you can’t use the Image Streamer to run Windows or stateful Linux on Synergy, it doesn’t mean they wont’ run. It is still possible to create a boot disk and provision it to a compute node (boot-from-san, boot from USB or SD, etc.). For compatibility, you can use Synergy compute note like a traditional rack-mount or blade server. Of course, when you do, you lose all of the potential benefits of the platform from its imaging and automation engines.

The Fabric

The Synergy Fabric the other huge differentiating factor with Synergy Platform. A single frame is probably not what you’ll see deployed anywhere. Synergy is built to scale up within the rack – with up to 5 frames interconnected to the same converged fabric that provides Ethernet, Fibre Channel, FCoE and iSCSI across all of the frames. Synergy uses a parent/child module to extend the managed fabric across multiple frames. A parent module is inserted in one frame and child modules in up to 4 additional frames. Similar to Composer and Image Streamer modules, the interconnect modules on Synergy uses a pair of parent modules in different frames to achieve high availability. Management of the interconnect modules and fabric is a single interface and utilizes MLAG connections between the modules to communicate management changes.

Shared Local Disk

StoreVirtual is a primary use case with Synergy Platform and HPE expect many users will choose their VSA to do software defined storage in Synergy. But it is hard to get enough disks to matter in the blade form factor. To allow for this, HPE is also showing off a new disk shelf that can fit into two compute bays on a frame. The HPE Synergy D3940 disk shelf can hold up to 40 small form factor disks that can be carved out and consumed by any of the compute nodes in the frame. One important limitation here, however, is that the local disks are only accessible inside of a single frame. The SAS module used for these disks is in a separate bay and is separate from the fabric. So all the disks need to be presented to compute within the frame.

However, StoreVirtual to the rescue. Either bare metal StoreVirtual or more likely as a VSA, the StoreVirtual can take those local disks and present them in a way that they can be consumed or clustered with compute in other frames. All 40 disks may be presented to a single StoreVirtual instance and then clustered with 2 additional StoreVirtual instances in other frames – and then the fabric can consume the storage from StoreVirtual. The great thing is you have choice as a consumer to instantiate and then recompose these resources as needed on Synergy.

Who benefits from these characteristics?

It is critically important to note that you can run traditional workloads side-by-side with cloud-native workloads. While cloud-native benefit more from the Image Streamer and account for stateless OS operation, traditional IT workloads can be run on the same hardware. From the Composer, you can assemble a traditional server, with boot from SAN or boot from local disk in the compute node and run a client-server application. This flexibility is important as organizations attempt to build the new style apps but need to support existing applications. It means that a single hardware platform will be able to deliver both. Unfortunately, organizations that choose to run legacy systems on Synergy won’t be able to fully realize all the benefits Synergy Platform has to offer since most do not apply to these legacy workloads, but having the flexibility is key.

From my viewpoint, no company is going to buy into Synergy simply to run legacy applications on it. The real benefits are for companies that are planning or in the middle of application transition. For companies who have not begun the transition process, Synergy and Composable Infrastructure is going to be a tough sell – because they’re not thinking in ways where the benefits Synergy delivers matter.

May 24, 2016 1 comment

Compute Datacenter Storage

HPE introduces Synergy, a hardware platform for composable infrastructure

by Philip Sellers December 8, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

The new Hewlett Packard Enterprise introduced its first major new platform last week during HPE Discover in London. The new platform is named Synergy and is based around the idea of composable infrastucture – hardware that can be programatically composed into the desired form for a specific use case. The Synergy platform follows up on the Project Synergy concept HP introduced during the June Discover event in Las Vegas. While HPE has been working with third-parties to get support for its API for composable infrastructure, it was also creating the new generation of hardware needed to power the concept.

HPE staff says that Synergy is a completely new hardware platform built to enable the composable concept. In many ways, the Synergy platform looks like a next-generation C7000 blade chassis. There are quick, noticeable differences.

HPE-Synergy-with-Composer-Pulled-out_low

HPE Synergy 12000 Frame with 12 compute nodes and the Synergy Composer module pulled out

Synergy trims down the number of compute slots from 16 to 12. When asked why – HPE execs told me that the goal of the Synergy platform was to power compute for the next 10 years and that meant flexibility not density as a primary concern. Some peer bloggers scoffed at the 10 year future for the platform, but as an HP customer, that is the lifetime I have received from my existing C7000 BladeSystems as a platform, which are approaching a 10 year anniversary.

With the Synergy platform, there are some terminology changes. HPE engineers told me that they are moving away from the term blade and refer to the servers as compute nodes. The interconnects become the fabric in the Synergy platform. And lastly, the core chassis that everything plugs into is known as a frame.

In an attempt to future-proof the new platform, HPE created a mid-plane in the frame that is photonics capable – meaning, when photonics come to market, there are pathways to utilize them in this chassis. The midplane has also been simplified, according to HPE engineers and there is a bit more breathing room mean for cooling around the servers. Utilizing the additional space, the new compute nodes will have the same number of DIMM slots as their rackmount counterparts, allowing them to stack as much RAM and removing any downside to the converged platform.

Solving issues of scale

While the physical hardware largely resembles the C7000 BladeSystem chassis, HPE set out to solve several of the problems that exist with the C7000 when trying to create a composable infrastructure platform.

First, Synergy embraces HPE OneView as the management platform, removing the onboard administrator management. OneView lives within the Synergy Composer, a management appliance that exists in one of the two appliance bays located on the left side of each of the Synergy platform frame.

Second, Synergy scales better using OneView by allowing a single Synergy Composer to manage up to 20 frames. The Frame Link Module is built to connect frames over greater distances over normal twisted pair, copper cables (CAT5, CAT6, etc.). For redundancy, another Synergy Composer can be placed into an appliance bay in a different frame and the pair mirror one another with failover capabilities.

Solving issues of the OS

Third, Synergy introduces an all-new Synergy Image Streamer – another type of appliance module that sits in an appliance bay – allows for all the boot images required for systems to be stored centrally and managed. The idea behind Image Streamer is to bring many of the same benefits of virtualization to a physical world. Images are stored in the streamer and combined into a Server Profile which includes all of the BIOS settings, WWN and MAC address settings and . The bootable image is presented to the compute node over iSCSI to allow for boot. The complexity of the iSCSI configuration is masked away from the user and handled by Synergy Composer. A second Image Streamer can also be added to another frame for redundancy and the two mirror one another.

The Image Streamer squarely targets OS models without persistent data. Currently, Linux, VMware ESXi and Docker are currently supported OS models with Image Streamer. The boot image is stored as a Golden Master in the Image Streamer and this golden image is forked and combined with a ‘personality’ containing the IP address, hostname and other settings that are applied against the image at boot. The personality can include necessary steps to configure the OS, such as esxcli commands to perform configuration after boot. It is worth noting that Windows is not currently on the list of supported OSes. To patch your OS, you boot the golden image, integrate your changes and then recommit the golden image. At this point, you are able to recompose all of your assigned compute nodes, reboot them and you’re instantly patched. If a patch causes an issue, you are able to roll back to previous state just as easily with a reboot.

Using the Image Streamer doesn’t prevent users from running traditional workloads – like local booting or boot from SAN Windows cluster nodes with SAN storage. Traditional servers can be configured and setup next to Image Streamer profiles. HPE engineers see the Image Streamer as the ultimate flexiblity

Improving connectivity

Another major change is around the fabric and connectivity of the Synergy platform. Since the storage and network have converged even in the C7000 years using FlexFabric modules, Synergy continues this converged theme by utilizing the same Virtual Connect technology of the C7000 and extending it so that a single controlling Virtual Connect module in a one frame can be physically connected to child fabric modules in additional frames. The single Virtual Connect allows for centralized control of Virtual Connect over multiple chassis – or frames. The modules can be daisy chained to simplify management and mobility between compute nodes. The benefit is flexibility to reassign the same server profile to a compute note in a wider range of chassis. The C7000 would almost certainly limit you to blades in the same chassis as reassignment options – due to boundaries of the WWN and MAC ranges.

HPE-Synergy-with-Storage-Module-pulled-out_low

In addition to Virtual Connect, there is also a 12Gb SAS storage module that allows connectivity to Synergy D3940 Storage Modules located in the frame, like the one pulled out in the picture above. The new storage module can be equipped with up to 40 small form factor drives that can be grouped and presented to the compute nodes in the same frame. This would allow disks to be attached and presented as local storage or served up as a StoreVirtual VSA within an ESXi host.

Ship date & pricing

Synergy platform is expected to go on sale at the end of first quarter in 2016 and ship to customers during second quarter of 2016. Pricing has not been announced.

For deployments utilizing the Image Streamer with full redundancy, a minimum of three frames will be required, according to HPE engineers. This allows the necessary management NICs for redundancy with the Image Streamer and redundancy with the Composer appliances. This aligns the Synergy platform with larger environments that need flexibility and the ability to shift and adapt workloads often and on the fly.

December 8, 2015 1 comment

Compute Datacenter Software Storage

HP sees Composable Infrastructure as the foundation of future IT

by Philip Sellers July 23, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

The company that created the converged infrastructure concept with its blades is at it again. HP announced during HP Discover plans around a concept called Composable Infrastructure. Now, let me be the first to say, much of what makes up Composable Infrastructure today isn’t new to HP. But, the name is new for an overarching strategy for individual developments that have been building in the company for a while.

First, what is Composable Infrasturcture? It is the idea of being able to control physical and virtual pools of resources with software through a single, consistent API with full lifecycle support for deployment, management, self-healing and decomissioning.

partners The idea is that through HP OneView and its available API’s, developers can define and call this API to compose, decompose or recompose the infrastructure into its desired specification. Big names within the developer community including OpenStack, Docker, Ansible, Puppet and Chef have all signed on to be a part of HP’s partner program around Composable Infrastructure.

In addition to the API capabilities within OneView, HP also announced a new, multi-year strategy to move beyond software automation to fully automate the lifecycle of bi-modal infrastructure that can bridge companies between traditional IT and new cloud-native IT. HP calls this strategy Project Synergy.

projectsynergy

For Project Synergy, the company plans to develop a full ecosystem which aims to allow for definition and instantiation on infrastructure – both physical and virtual – with integration into management and development platforms. It accelerates application and infrastructure orchestration for both traditional and cloud applications.

Not all new territory

When I say this isn’t a net new thing within HP, the first thing to look at is HP OneView. OneView 2.0 was announced during HP Discover and is the second major release of their infrastructure management product. During the life of version 1, OneView has consistently added new functionality in each point release. OneView has extended beyond blade servers and networking to include rack mount hardware and extended beyond servers to manage 3PAR storage, also, all during the version 1 release.

OneView brings the concept of a single management console to control and create servers, storage and networking. It is the cornerstone of the HP ConvergedSystems solutions – enabling a centralized management for these purpose built solutions. It has also become a monitoring and management platform for other HP infrastructure. HP realizes that all the goodness brought to ConvergedSystems by OneView can also be applied to larger pools of resources and this is where Composable Infrastructure comes in.

Another point in saying this isn’t new territory for HP is that RESTful API’s it has been working hard to develop in the HP ProLiant systems. HP is been working to create a RESTful API on the iLO4 management chips. Its another step in being able to take programatic definitions and instantiate those definitions on hardware. HP 3PAR has similiar capabilities through SSMC, which shares a similar DNA to OneView. And as a customer looking into HP, I fully expect (but have no confirmation) we will see similar interfaces develop in networking and for other storage platforms.

Bright Possibilities

Front and center in the Composable Infrastructure announcement is letting software call the shots. In the future, this allows orchestration tools to reach into a pool of raw compute, storage and network in hardware form and create the infrastructure it requires based on its definition. It would be very similar to the vision VMware has painted for cloud automation around the vSphere platform, only with physical hardware and lacking the VMware layers of software. For solutions like OpenStack and container technologies, this allows you to bypass the VMware vTax and work directly on hardware.

But the vision extends beyond providing a programatic way to provision and deprovision hardware. The vision is to integrate in a way that the full lifecycle is taken into account with automation, management and analytics to assist with the operation of the hardware for the entire life of the product it is supporting. HP wants to take its analytics and be able to make decisions and create self-healing infrastructure that is able to react to changes in the environment and continue to operate without manual intervention. Since all the definitions and all of the steps to create the hardware infrastructure are stored in software, the ability to recompose, as HP calls it, the infrastructure is viable in the future.

Again, the message sounds very similar to one the VMware has been talking about with vRealize products, but it is a vision that neither company has fully realized. Both, I’d argue, have significant assets in the areas needed, but neither one has an fully integrated, end-to-end solution at this time. The challenge is going to be how well these products integrate and how easily they can be deployed and configured for customers to realize the benefits of the vision. I think simplicity of management and configuration will be the key factor.

Bimodal infrastructure was another big buzzword with the HP folks during HP Discover and its the concept of having a single set of infrastructure serve your needs for both the traditional applications your enterprise needs along with the cloud applications that your enterprise should be investing in for the future, according to HP. The cloud native applications will allow the enterprise to be more agile, delivering innovation continually instead of in large, monolithic phases. Continual delivery will allow the organization to adjust incrementally as the environment changes in a way that is impossible with monolithic applications.

Vision always paints a picture of the perfect world and those practitioners who work in IT know that vision and reality often have a gap in between. The problem with orchestration and cloud automation packages to date have been the complexity required to configure and get these systems working. As this develops, my hope is that its done in a way that keeps things clean and simple so that customers can gain the most benefit. If HP OneView is a benchmark, there is hope that this can happen in HP.

July 23, 2015 0 comments