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System Administration

ProLiant servers getting RESTful API for management

by Philip Sellers December 3, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

ProLiant servers are getting some REST – a RESTful API. One of the innovations HP is showing off on the HP Discover showroom floor is a new RESTful interface packaged as part of the iLO management chips on ProLiant servers. With the RESTful API, HP hopes to deliver future generations of ProLiant that can be easily provisioned and controlled from tools like HP OneView. RESTful interfaces are becoming the go-to standard within HP for interoperability between their products.

HP RESTful API is a management interface can be used to perform configuration, inventory, and monitoring. The RESTful API is available on Gen8 and Gen9 hardware with iLO firmware 2.0 and greater. On Gen9 and future hardware, the interface will be able to configure both BIOS and iLO settings on the server. On Gen8 servers, the RESTful API will only expose the capabilities inside of the iLO.

According to HP, a REST client will send HTTPS operations to the iLO web server and there are three modes that can be used – command line interface, file based and JSON-formatted data. The use of HTTPS is a big security plus versus many other remote management interfaces that are often

The folks at HP are working with other vendors in the market to establish a standard that they call the Redfish Specification. Redfish is supposed to create a standardized interface for IP Management Interfaces on servers to allow uniform control and reporting across multi-vendor server environments. The standardization should allow the same management software to be able to manage heterogeneous servers. Redfish is corporately sponsored by Dell, Intel, HP and Emerson.

For more information, see http://www.hp.com/go/restfulapi.

Disclaimer: HP invited and paid for my trip to attend HP Discover EMEA. The views and opinions I’ve written were not dictated or approved by HP and are my own.

December 3, 2014 0 comments

HP announces Hyper-Converged Systems based on StoreVirtual VSA

by Philip Sellers October 14, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

HP unveiled the HP Converged System 200-HC StoreVirtual based on HP ProLiant SL2500 series of scalable computing servers and the HP StoreVirtual VSA today at VMworld in Barcelona. The CS 200-HC StoreVirtual features VMware vSphere 5, the HP StoreVirtual VSA, and HP OneView for management. The CS 200-HC StoreVirtual line comes in two different models – one with all SAS for higher capacity and one with a mix of SSD and SAS drives for better performance.

Four nodes of compute fit into just 2U of rack space, with shared redundant power for the unit. From a physical size standpoint, these nodes fit somewhere between a Moonshot card and a BladeSystem blade in terms of sizing. While they more closely resemble a blade, there is no shared interconnect back-plane. Each node comes with dedicated 10Gb Ethernet and 1Gb Ethernet network ports and has 6 dedicated disks.

A new addition to the software mix for the Converged System 200-HC line is HP OneView InstantOn – a streamlined deployment utility that lets customers spin up vSphere with StoreVirtual VSA in a matter of minutes. According to HP, all that a customer needs to provide is IP addresses and basic license information in order to have a fully working system delivered directly from the factory.

CS 200-HC

A comparison of the hardware configuration shows just a few differences between the two initial StoreVirtual models:

CS 240-HC StoreVirtual System

4 nodes, each with
2 sockets, 8 cores each socket at 2.0Ghz
128GB of RAM each node
2 x 10GbE and 2 x 1GbE NICs per node
6 x 1.2TB SAS SFF drives per node

CS 242-HC StoreVirtual System

4 nodes, each with
2 sockets, 10 cores each socket at 2.8GHz
256GB of RAM each node
2 x 10GbE and 2 x 1GbE NICs per node
4 x 1.2TB SAS SFF drives per node
2 x 400GB SSDs per node

In terms of scale, up to 8 of the CS 240-HC line units can be coupled together to form up to 32-node clusters and not all of those nodes need to be in a single site because of StoreVirtual’s native replication and multi-site capabilities.

StoreVirtual VSA features Autonomic Optimization, a fancy name for storage sub-lun tiering that the CS 242-HC StoreVirtual is using. This allows for more often accessed blocks of data to be moved from SAS onto SSD and less used to be moved from SSD down to SAS yeilding greater performance from the storage subsystem. StoreVirtual also provides a wide range of interoperability options for customers who have already invested in dedicated StoreVirtual 4000 hardware solutions or who have existing StoreVirtual VSA deployments. In addition, native replication is available to any other StoreVirtual, regardless of form factor, and StoreVirtual offers support for vSphere Metro Storage Clusters, offering the ability to create multi-datacenter replication solutions around the technology. Beyond native replication, HP StoreVirtual also includes Peer Motion capabilities to allow movement of data from one StoreVirtual environment to another for easy migration.

The advantage to moving to a Converged System solution, according to HP, is easier management and a better support experience for the solution. The solution is tested and supported together as a package, offering customers a single point of contact for their support. The firmware, drivers and software are all tested together and the will receive recipe updates so that known good combinations of the software can be run on the platform.

Choice is always at the forefront of HP’s strategy for customers and the hyper-converged system announcement is no different. The HP Converged System 200-HC models are available in both a StoreVirtual VSA and EVO:RAIL configuration. The primary difference between the two configuration is the virtual storage appliance, with the EVO:RAIL configuration coming with VMware’s vSAN, though I cannot find any specifics of the EVO:RAIL hardware configuration at this time.

When I was in Houston, TX, for a Converged Systems Tech Day last month, HP staff talked with me about the overall Converged System strategy and there were several key points to the overall strategy. With all Converged Systems, there is an accelerated deployment timeline with the solution. Since it has been tested and integrated, the product should deploy quickly so that customers realize faster time to value. The second point is easy procurement, with a single SKU for the entire solution. The single SKU also provides single solution support, with a specialized team that supports the entire solution rather than the individual components. Customers who have built their own solutions from ProLiant and HP Storage have probably experienced the piece-meal support experience, even while in a single vendor. HP’s Converged Systems eliminates that problem by sending all support to a dedicated support team to team to troubleshoot problems and that team understands the entire solution, not just an individual component.

The new Converged System 200-HC StoreVirtual models will be available for purchase in December. The Converged System 200-HC EVO:RAIL configuration will be available first quarter of 2015.

For more information, check out Around the Storage Block post and video on the CS 200-HC StoreVirtual solution and go to www.hp.com/go/hyper-converge.

October 14, 2014 1 comment

Home Tech

STOP shipping adware to customers through Installers

by Philip Sellers July 22, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

Attention Software Vendors!! I kindly request that you STOP shipping adware to customers through your Installers. Twice this week, I have had installers attempt to add software onto my system that I never agreed to. CNET’s installer offered me a dose of extra adware for a program I needed on my Mac and today a vendor, whose product I had PAID for, attempted to install adware on my system without giving me the option to opt out. Its a common practice to include browser bars and other search helps with free software. Big vendors like Oracle are paid by search vendors to package their products with Java installers. But I’m not complaining about them, specifically, because Oracle is asking before throwing the crap browser bars onto your system.

No, today, I experienced a new low. I have used PowerISO for a few months now and I was honestly happy with their product. Today, it prompted me to update to its latest version and I clicked the button to download and install this update. On download, however, without any further prompts, it attempted to install SearchProtect by Conduit, which is a browser hijack malware. Luckily, my antivirus caught this attempt and blocked it. Much to my surprise, SearchProtect persistently attempted to install SEVERAL more times. This is absolutely underhanded.

Before taking to my blog, however, I did send my feelings to the company in the form of the email below, but I doubt it will do any good. In the least, take it from me – don’t use PowerISO.

To: [email protected]
Subject: SearchProtect Malware in Update
I am HIGHLY disappointed that after purchasing your product, when I was prompted to download an update that the update attempted to install malware. On download, the updater attempted to install SearchProtect by Conduit onto my system which my ANTIVIRUS caught and stopped from installing. I paid for your product and I do not appreciate you attempting to sneak other adware onto my system. I am searching for an alternative product to meet my needs, but it will not be your product. You have lost my trust.

Sincerely,
Philip Sellers

July 22, 2014 1 comment

Tech Books

Book Review: VMware vSphere Resource Management Essentials

by Philip Sellers July 3, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

</p> <p>VMware vSphere Resource Management Essentials is a great resource for users getting started with vSphere and trying to understand the principles of resource management in shared computing environments. Virtualization on vSphere introduces lots of concepts for a newcomer and this book does a great job explaining those concepts, required licensing and specific vSphere features. It is a must read for beginners, small deployment administrators and admins with growing deployments of vSphere.

The book is a relatively short read at just over 100 pages and 4 chapters long. The chapters are logically arranged and step you through vSphere installation and configuration. The first chapter focuses on requirements and installation. The second and third chapters focus on the resource management features and the more advanced features respectively and the final chapter focuses on monitoring and management of resources.

Clearly focused on covering the basics, the book is focused towards new or beginner admins just breaking into vSphere. It is an easy read and experienced admins can learn a thing or two that we may have forgotten or overlooked in the past. I personally bookmarked a couple items related to licensing levels required for specific vSphere features and the book prompted me to go back and re-evaluate some of the ways I assign resource pools in my virtual infrastructure.

VMware vSphere Resource Management Essentials is written by Jonathan Frappier (@jfrappier) and published by Packt Publishing. It is available directly from Packt Publishing, from Amazon, and in lots of books stores worldwide.

July 3, 2014 0 comments

Datacenter Storage

Storage Essentials 9.7 shows off performance enhancements and new platform support

by Philip Sellers June 12, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

This week at HP Discover, the Storage Essentials team unwrapped version 9.7 of the product for customers to see. The next release, code-named Castle, features a number of enhancements with support for several new EMC storage platforms, support for Windows 2012 and updates to support a lot of new versions of array code. Storage Essentials 9.7 also focuses heavily on performance improvements and is expected to be released in July.

One of the major shifts in architecture for Storage Essentials is a move away from embedded Oracle database to an embedded PostgreSQL database. The new database platforms appears to be less resource intensive [from my own testing], quicker to install and just as responsive as the previous embedded Oracle. Upgrade and migration from 9.6.1 to the new release migrates the data painlessly, since Storage Essentials packages its own database export utility that pulls out the data from Oracle and pushes it into PostgreSQL easily. The overall installation time is considerably less since the switch to PostgreSQL.

For 9.7, the Storage Essentials team has worked to improve load times and performance of the application. One of the changes made for performance is decoupling the topology calculation which relates elements together after discovery so that it can be run once at the end of the collection process. In my environment, the changes have reduced the time to perform a backup data collection from about an 1 hour and 20 minutes to about 16 minutes, including topology calculation, as a result of optimization in the code. Another performance improvement deals with how the data is loaded into the Java applet of the application. The improvements result in faster loads of the Capacity Manager, Backup Manager and Performance screens.

Storage Essentials is a storage resource management software. It provides topology visualization for storage environments, centralized storage system event logging, performance reporting and a wide array of preconfigured reports for the SAN switches, arrays and hosts. Storage Essentials can collect information from SAN connected hosts, monitor file servers and NAS resources, monitor capacity and performance.

Slides and additional information from the session presented will be made available on the HP Discover website.

Disclaimer: I spoke about the next generation version of Storage Essentials along with Inge De Maere and Kara McMillian during HP Discover. I worked with HP Storage Essentials team as a beta user of the new version and they invited me to share my customer experience during the What’s New session.

June 12, 2014 0 comments

Datacenter Storage

HP Data Protector will support Federated Catalyst at launch

by Philip Sellers June 12, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

This is a follow-up to an earlier blog post about Federated Catalyst, a new feature in HP StoreOnce D2D backup devices. See the earlier post for more information about Federated Catalyst.

HP_Data_Protector Without backup software to actually use Federated Catalyst, the technology itself doesn’t do much good, so my first question is when would Data Protector support Federated Catalyst. The good news is that Data Protector 8 and 9 will both support Federated Catalyst when it becomes generally available with the new 3.11 StoreOnce firmware.

I confirmed with Data Protector staff that Data Protector 9, which was recently announced and soon to be launched, will support Federated Catalyst at launch and Data Protector 8 is getting support via a patch. Users already running Data Protector 8.12 should already have support delivered for their existing backup environment.

Data Protector 9 was announced on May 14, during Microsoft TechEd, with a laun
ch timeframe scheduled roughly one month afterwards. The new version of Data Protector features enhancements for vSphere backups, including a new method to perform granular file recovery directly from full VMDK backups.

The Data Protector team also announced a new product called Backup Navigator on May 14. Backup Navigator is a dashboard and analytics platform for backup. The intent of Backup Navigator is to observe and learn how backup is running in Data Protector so that in future releases it can predict and make recommendations to improve backups and then in a third phase, it will be able to fully automate backup scheduling and operations.

As a Data Protector customer, support for Federated Catalyst should allow for easier administration and fewer required Catalyst stores in a backup environment. It is also welcome news that both the HP Storage and HP Autonomy Data Protector teams timed the release together in both products.

Disclaimer: HP invited me to HP Discover as a blogger and covered my expenses to attend the event. I also spoke at a session during the event. As always, the views and opinions stated on this blog are my own. HP was given no editorial control over content or topics for my posts.

June 12, 2014 0 comments

Datacenter Storage

HP introducing Federated Catalyst to StoreOnce

by Philip Sellers June 10, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

b6500 This week at HP Discover, HP announced a new Federated Catalyst feature for the StoreOnce family of disk to disk backup arrays. The new capability will allow backup administrators to make large Catalyst stores on a StoreOnce and allow for data to be striped across all the back-end service sets in the array. Federated Catalyst is available immediately on the StoreOnce B6500 line and will be coming in a few weeks to the StoreOnce B6200 line.

Federated Catalyst overcomes a previous limitation in the StoreOnce family that tied a Catalyst store to a single service set within a StoreOnce device. The same limitation exists for a CIFS store or a virtual tape library store in a StoreOnce array. This is another advantage for HP’s Catalyst technology since it assists administrators who are managing many Catalyst stores.

Previously, within a StoreOnce with 2 couplets and 4 service sets, a minimum of 4 Catalyst stores would be required to use all the available resources in the device. This added additional management points and coordination for the backup administrator within the backup software. By striping the data across all the available service sets, a single large Catalyst store is possible to utilize all the available data.

There are other considerations such as deduplication ratios for stores and the number of backup streams that go into architecting the best possible backup environment but breaking Catalyst stores away from service set boundaries will let IT shops make better decisions about how to lay out stores within StoreOnce for backup. This also provides more scalability for medium sizes shops that may want to purchase a StoreOnce with a smaller initial sizing and grow it over time.

Compared to VTL technology, Catalyst offers a simplified approach to managing backup data. With VTL’s, a library is built and it is populated with emulated tape cartridges. Like physical cartridges, each one has a bar code and media label and other properties that dictate when the data on the cartridge expires and may be re-used. Within a VTL, however, if there are more cartridges than needed, the un-used cartridges will be used before any cartridges are recycled and reused based on backup policies. This leads to inefficiency and extra storage utilization within VTL libraries.

On the flip side, if the VTL has too few cartridges, then the library runs out of space and backups stop. This leads to a big management point for administrators to size and ensure the correct number of cartridges. Catalyst also improves the VTL situation by improving performance. VTL emulates physical tape and so backup software talks with it and expects a certain amount of time before a tape is loaded or unloaded and this adds time to backups. With Catalyst aware software, the D2D backup device is seen for what it really with all of its native capabilities instead of being seen as tape.

June 10, 2014 1 comment

Trends

Struggling with margin and technical debt

by Philip Sellers June 4, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

If left unchecked, its only a matter of time before every administrator becomes overwhelmed by technical debt. It may be just months on a new job for a lazy admin or it may be several years for someone whose actively trying to manage their task list, but at a certain point, its bound to happen. My coworkers are probably tired of me talking about the topic, but its one that’s really impacting me today. The idea of technical debt is the accumulation of all the things on your to-do list or your must-do list that cannot be done due to lack of time. This is an issue that affects so many environments – particularly in 2014 when all departments have been asked for the last 5 or 6 years to do more with less people and time.

Like other environments, we have adopted a number of new systems throughout the company. With each system and implementation, it comes with a whole list of things to startup the new system and then adds maintenance and upkeep tasks to our lists. As new projects were onboarded, time began to slip away for handling other maintenance tasks. And because of the fast pace keeping up with new projects, some tasks get left undone.

Any of these things that are left undone get added to your technical debt. Think of it the same way you think about credit card debt. Each time you have a task or a new project that needs something done its like swiping your credit card. When you complete the task, you’ve paid it off. Over time, you may forget a task or it simply drops off your to-do list but its still part of your owed balance.

There are a lot of books in the library that deal with time management, but I want to talk about a slightly different take on the problem from a systems administrator’s viewpoint. You see, to an administrator, managing technical debt is essential in keeping an environment secure and operating well. If you allow your technical debt to get too large, you are introducing lots of risk into your environment by ignoring the tasks that should be performed simply because you’ve exhausted your time to do these things.

So just like credit card debt, you need a plan to manage your technical debt. If left unmanaged, you may get into a situation where you struggle to make minimum payments – essentially being only able to react to the most pressing issue of the moment.

I can remember a time not long ago when I felt like my environment was pretty well managed. I remember having time to do a daily walk-through of our primary data center looking for warning or error lights on systems and I remember having time for doing periodic maintenance tasks on the systems I managed. Today, however, it seems I’m struggling just to make my minimum payments on technical debt.

So what is the plan? I think the first part of the plan is establishing margin.

Just like the margins on a page which help to make it more appealing to read, margin in your work life (or personal life) helps to bring you in from the edges and provide you with cushion. Without margins in a book, your eyes get tired faster because its more difficult to read without the room to breathe around the words on the page.

Margin allows you to react to the things that will inevitably come up while not ignoring the important things that need your attention. Margin is intentionally built in extra time that can be used for reacting or more importantly for dreaming about solutions to your bigger problems in the environment. Margin allows a relaxed pace at times to make better decisions about strategies in your environment, as opposed to only being allowed to make rapid fire reactions.

The second part of the plan is the Dave Ramsey Debt Snowball idea applied to technology. Dave Ramsey advocates picking the smallest of your credit cards and paying it off first rather than focusing on paying off the one with a higher balance or interest rate. The result is a quick win and a feeling of accomplishment. I think the same should be applied to technical debt. Pick a project with an undone task list and knock out that list. That feeling of accomplishment will help drive you towards the next and the next and the next things on your list.

But while I’m writing this, I’m really talking to myself as much as anyone else. I’m struggling to establish margin at work. The lack of margin today results in a more stressful workday where I feel constantly reactionary instead of proactive. I’m feeling like I’m treading water and about to sink. So, I’m interested to hear anyone else’s experiences or advice with technical debt.

June 4, 2014 1 comment

Compute Datacenter Storage Virtualization

Squeezing the ultimate performance out of vSphere

by Philip Sellers June 2, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

Over the course of the past few months, I have had the opportunity to compare physical workloads directly against virtualized workloads. As workloads have moved into vSphere in the environment that I support, we have had the opportunity to compare workloads head to head, pinpoint some bottlenecks and remedy them in our environment. In addition, I have spent a considerable amount of time researching running business critical applications inside of vSphere.

Power Profiles Matter with Performance

In Elias Khnaser’s PluralSight course Best Practices for Running XenApp/XenDesktop on vSphere, he says to check the power management settings of your servers, particularly in blade servers, since they many come with a dynamic power profile based on processor performance states (P-states). P-states conserve energy in servers by operating the processor it different power levels. With a dynamic profile, it may be lowering power to the CPU in order to save energy, but at the expense of optimized performance.

hp_power_profile I checked this on my HP ProLiant blade servers and they were set to the default “Balanced Power and Performance.” The label doesn’t sound all that bad, but on further searching, this setting enabled the dynamic power management within a server. With this enabled, the CPU’s seemed to be powering down and taking additional time to power up when demand from vSphere increases.

Changing the Power Management setting to “Maximum Performance” ensures that the CPU stays powered fully, however, it may take additional power to do so. In my initial testing, this increased performance within my business critical applications where we are measuring transaction times. We were able to observe a decrease in the transaction times by nearly one half.

ilopowersettings

HP has a technical whitepaper outlining Power Regulation in ProLiant servers. I found two ways that you can adjust the power profile – both by entering BIOS during boot and also in the iLO on ProLiant systems. For ProLiant G7 and Gen8 systems, the iLO power profile change is instantaneous. For G6 and earlier systems with iLO 2, it appears to activate on next boot. I also found that depending on the profile setting on the hardware, vSphere presents different options at the hypervisor level. When the server is in dynamic mode, vSphere is able to configure a profile from the Configuration tab of the host. When set to “Maximum Performance”, the ability to change or set a profile is not available in vSphere.

In addition, VMware has a knowledgebase article (1018206) with troubleshooting steps for poor performance based on power settings. This KB article details not only HP ProLiant servers but also Dell servers.

And finally, there is one more place to check and that is the power profile settings within your Guest OS. Setting the profile to a high performance profile may also have a positive impact on performance.

Training: Business Critical Apps on vSphere

VMware has made some great online training available to all customers and the same courses are available to partners who seeking accredittation for virtualizing business critical apps (though Partner University). Each course is a 3 hour, online self-paced class.

Paravirtualized SCSI driver

paravirtual2 VMware unanimously makes the recommendation to the the Paravirtualized SCSI adapters within guest OSes when running business critical apps on vSphere in all the courses linked above. Paravirtualized SCSI adapters are higher performance disk controllers that allow for better throughput and lower CPU utilization in guest OSes according to VMware KB article 1010398. The same KB article also gives step by step instruction for adding the controller and driver into Guest OSes.

Reserve the Entire Memory Allotment

reserveallguestmemory VMware recommends reserving the entire memory allotment for virtual machines running business critical apps. This ensure no contention where high performance applications are concerned. vSphere 5 and higher with virtual hardware version 8 or higher has a checkbox that allows for reserving the entire allotment of vRAM, even as allocations change.

Avoid Thin on Thin Storage Provisioning

From my own experience, running vSphere thin-provisioning works great on array technology that does not have native thin provisioning capabilities, but if the storage has thin provisioning at the array level, use that and instead use the thick provisioning in vSphere, however which thick provisioning option to use varies by array.

While moving an application onto vSphere in my environment, we had development setup on an array without thinning capabilities and production on an array with thin provisioning. The production environment took more than double the time to perform the data build-out when utilizing thin on thin capabilities. Once we noticed this, investigation showed that it was thin on thin that was causing the performance derogation. Once the disk allocated the blocks within the VMDK, the performance derogation disappeared. Our theory is that the slowdown occurs when allocating new blocks for data.

Converting the production virtual machine to thick disks by performing a storage vMotion to a new LUN caused the build to complete in less time than on the development VM backed by the array without thin capabilities. In my particular case, it was an EVA without thin capabilities backing development and a 3PAR with thin provisioned LUNs backing production. The recommendation for 3PAR is to use “Thick Eager Zero” disks since the 3PAR will recognize and zero out the space of the ‘eager’ zeroed disks. I have seen other recommendations for different arrays, where many recommend the “Thick Lazy Zero” disks.

Thin on thin also presents more challenges in estimating and accommodating growth in an array over time. Any thin provisioning technology should be monitored for over-allocation to ensure that there is adequate room for growth on the array. Doing thin on thin may obstruct this view somewhat, so proceed with caution and know that you’re likely losing some performance.

June 2, 2014 0 comments

Compute Datacenter Storage

Questioning HP ConvergedSystems and their Intended Purposes

by Philip Sellers May 28, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

convergedsystem

I recently had the opportunity to sit in on a call announcing a new product offering from HP ConvergedSystems. The call left me with many more questions. The new ConvergedSystem offering is built for Microsoft Analytics software and is highly tailored to doing big data analysis.

As a systems administrator, many times it is up to my group to implement and integrate our storage, networking and servers to provide infrastructure for our systems analysts to deploy their software solutions. This strategy normally works well and we use the same infrastructure for a wide range of solutions. We also reuse components several times during their life cycle. So, this is the point that I don’t fully understand HP’s strategy with the ConvergedSystems.

From what I do understand, ConvergedSystems are prepackaged solutions to help customers speed up procurement, implementation and support of a solution by bringing the customer a known configuration of storage, network, compute and software. The sales pitch is simplified management and deployment of the software solution. And on the back-end, it is intended to have better support because all the components are known and tested together and the support team is versed in all the components to support it as a single solution.

At a high level, this certainly makes sense. It’s a logical approach.

Where I have questions is the fact that it seems that most of the ConvergedSystem solutions are major infrastructure investments based around a particular software solution or use case. So, what happens in an environment if the software solution launches and then flops? Are they easily repurposed or are they so tailored to a particular solution that it’s a lost investment?

What happens with the hardware hits the end of its useful life for running Exchange? Or Microsoft SQL? Or another software package? With our existing BladeSystem and storage, we simply order refreshed hardware – something more powerful with increased RAM and CPU specs – transition the running software to the new hardware and then pass down the previous generation to be re-purposed into a new use. During the life of a blade server or a rack-mount server, it may run 5 or 6 different solutions. I don’t know if the same can be done with ConvergedSystems.

That also brings into question upgrades of the package solution – how do those work? If its third-party software, does HP deliver a streamlined upgrade that’s been tested with the hardware and management? What if it requires more CPU or RAM – can those components be easily traded or upgraded moving forward? Since the ConvergedSystems are so new, I’m not sure that they’ve been through refresh cycles yet to know.

I am obviously still learning, but I’ve spent a good bit of time around the HP portfolio – the AppSystems, VirtualSystems and CloudSystems – and I am still unclear where these fit in businesses. And given the exposure I’ve had through blogger briefings, I’m sure I’m not along with my questions. I’ll be attending HP Discover next month and this is one of the topics that I hope to get some clarification on from the HP folks.

May 28, 2014 2 comments