Tag:

Convergence

HPE introduces Synergy, a hardware platform for composable infrastructure

by Philip Sellers December 8, 2015

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

Datacenter Software

Upgrading the HP OneView appliance with new releases

by Philip Sellers August 5, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

HP announced the OneView 2.0 will be shipping soon during its HP Discover in June. In the meantime, they’ve released version 1.20.05 which addresses several security vunleratilities, including Poodle over TLS, and a bunch of other bugfixes. The release notes for 1.20.05 provide the full details, along with the previous 1.20 releases and their changes.

In case you haven’t upgraded your HP OneView appliance since it has been deployed, here is a walk-through to show you how simple the appliance is to update. The 1.20.05 release is a good choice to install since it packages up all the previous releases into a single bundle that can be installed to bring up completely up-to-date.

HP OneView Upgrade

Obtain the patch for HP OneView from the HP Software Depot.
(You will need an HP Passport account to ‘order’ them, but there is no charge.)

Login to the OneView web interface as an administrative user.
Navigate to the Settings section in the OneView menu.
Under Settings, select the Actions button and choose the Update Appliance option.

In the Update Appliance section, select Browse and select the .bin file you downloaded in step 1. Choose the Upload and Install button to begin uploading the patch. You may also select Upload to stage, but not install, the patch.
The update will upload to the appliance.
You will be prompted again to Continue before the update installs.

Choose Agree and Update for the EULA when displayed.
The appliance will update and restart once completed.

August 5, 2015 0 comment

Datacenter Storage

Exploring HP’s Power of Common Architectures in Storage

by Philip Sellers January 31, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

During HP Discover last month, I had a great chance to hear from David Scott, Senior Vice President and General Manager of HP Storage, and also to have a conversation with Siamak Nazari, the Chief Software Architect of 3PAR. One of HP’s talking points for 3PAR for the last several years has been around the idea of Polymorphic Simplicity – a marketing term that they use to describe how HP is positioning the 3PAR architecture from the mid-range, to performance to high-end storage all with a single architecture, feature set and interoperability.

With the current arrangement of 3PAR systems, HP has the mid-range StoreServ 7200 with 2 nodes max, the StoreServ 7400 with 4 nodes max, it has the all-flash performance focused StoreServ 7450 and then the high-end StoreServ 10000 series arrays with a max of 8 nodes. All of the systems share the same 3PAR ASIC and software. The management interfaces and configuration concepts are the same regardless of which model. The underlying OS is the same across all – meaning that although the 7000 series was introduced just 1 year ago, its runs the same OS as the flagship 10000 series arrays which have been proven. The illustration below is from HP to show how the 3PAR architecture fits many different use cases where different factors are most important – all with one common architecture underneath.

HP-One-Architecture

While I’ve heard the message at previous HP events, it wasn’t until talking with Siamak Nazari that I began to understand why this has been such a big point from HP. Evolving a storage OS is a difficult tasks for any company. That’s why storage innovation often happens with start-up companies that build a new design from the ground up, instead of inside of mainline vendors evolving their dual-controller arrays into a modern storage array. HP’s purchase of 3PAR brought them a modern storage architecture that was natively multi-node capable. Where the complexities are exponentially more difficult to move from single controller, to dual controller to multi-controller, HP took the opposite approach by adapting a modern 8-node architecture down to a 2-node and 4-node configuration.

The real key for HP 3PAR customers is that by HP building a portfolio that spans a wide breadth of use cases, it expands the install base of the overall architecture while refining and enhancing the underlying OS. Enhancements made for one particular use case get shared by all of the customers through shared enhancements. Customers ultimately win by getting incremental improvements from their existing investment – all delivered by software.

HP has been consistently shipping improvements through software on the 3PAR StoreServ systems for several years. When it introduced the HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450 in June of 2013, the all-flash array boasted OS improvements for handling all-flash drives in the array. In December, HP revised the 7450 and nearly doubled performance to 900,000 IOPS with less than .7 milliseconds of latency [100 percent Random Reads, 4K block size local to controller] and more than doubled the possible capacity by introducing a new technology called Adaptive Sparing and by introducing new 480GB and 920GB SSDs at lower price points.

3par-ssd-dec2013

Adaptive Sparing allows the HP’s 3PAR StoreServ array take over coordination of sparing flash sectors instead of having the individual drive handle sparing. HP found that it could manage the sparing capacity as a pool more efficiently than by letting the individual drives handle this — and that allowed the 3PAR StoreServ arrays to access more of the actual flash capacity. The net result is an increase in overall utilization and lower the price point for flash in the array.

So, where is the benefit here for all? While the Adaptive Sparing technology was developed specifically for the all-flash 3PAR StoreServ 7450, the same Adaptive Sparing technology is also benefiting any HP 3PAR customer who is using SSD. This was one of the best examples of benefits from a common architecture that I had heard from HP.

But common architectures is not just a benefit from the HP 3PAR StoreServ – it is an approach adopted by other HP Storage solutions, also. HP’s StoreOnce D2D backup, StoreVirtual arrays and StoreAll NAS hardware are all based on their ProLiant hardware configurations. Since HP has made the conscious decision to build out solutions based on ProLiant servers, each generation provides performance increase and innovation that is also shared with software solutions. During Discover in Barcelona, Spain, last month, HP announced the new generation of the StoreOnce – the StoreOnce B6500 – based on the ProLiant Gen8 server hardware which boasts considerable performance gains obtained both by software and hardware improvements.

Taking the common architecture further to the software stack, StoreOnce and StoreAll also have a lot of shared DNA within their software stacks. Both solutions leverage the IBRIX technology that HP acquired in 2009. According to David Scott, the IBRIX distributed file engine is used across a couple product lines, although not specifically talked about. While HP knew that the IBRIX technology was fantastic technology, it was really about targeting the correct solutions for a problem and tuning the software to specific solutions. And like the shared ProLiant and shared 3PAR technology, incremental improvements on one side will mutually benefit the other sides as well.

January 31, 2014 1 comment

Compute Datacenter Software Storage

HP shows off OneView, a consolidated platform for converged management

by Philip Sellers December 10, 2013

written by Philip Sellers

In September, HP introduced its OneView platform for converged management. When first introduced, many of my fellow bloggers and I saw it as an appropriate replacement for HP System Insight Manager (SIM), but what we found is that OneView aims to go further than SIM was ever capable and with a cleaner and easier to understand UI. With OneView, HP is looking to bring together disparate management into a centralized console which can handle computer, storage and networking in a unified approach.

This week at HP Discover, Tom Joyce, Senior Vice President and GM of Converged Systems talked with our group of bloggers and it was clear that within the HP Converged Systems space, OneView is going to be the common management plane for all of the infrastructure – both servers, storage and networking. It is a major component of the Converged Systems strategy and a component that HP is investing heavily in developing.

Interface & Support

In terms of UI, HP took a ‘radically simple’ approach to the interface. It is a massive contrast to the busy and complex interfaces HP has designed in the past and at first pass more closely resembles a solution like Dell/Quest’s Foglight dashboards. All of this is welcome change. By heavily summarizing data and getting critical alerts and problems in front of an administrator, the systems potential usefulness increases exponentially.

Not neglecting the need for detail, OneView has an integrated search feature throughout the UI meaning that the details needed are a quick search or drilldown away.

With the initial release, HP OneView supports HP BladeSystem deployments with G7 and Gen8 blades and Gen8 rack-mount ProLiants. Like Virtual Connect, OneView creates server profiles which can be applied to individual blades but takes the concept a step further by also offering the ability to set lower-level BIOS settings on a blade that Virtual Connect does not address. While the initial compatibility list is very limited, more components will be added over time, though no one should expect older generations of server since much of the capabilities relies on iLO4 and other recent HP innovations.

Offering Context

Building upon the ‘Sea of Sensors’ concept that it introduced three or four generations of ProLiants ago, HP is driving towards a unified view of the physical environment surrounding its servers in the datacenter. HP’s Gen8 ProLiants introduced new smart power adapters which assist with mapping and locating hardware within smart racks in a datacenter. OneView is capable of building maps of these smart racks and smart power in order to identify where equipment is located, to identify hot spots and heat issues, and beings to aggregate the data obtained by the sea of sensors and offer context to it.

OneView also offers context for the interconnections of infrastructure as well as the physical environment. OneView offers great overviews of connection points between the server, its enclosure, the network sets and interconnects. It is a logical next step to extend this to connected storage and networks in future iterations.

December 10, 2013 0 comment

Compute Datacenter Software Storage

HP Discover Barcelona: What to expect & how to follow online this week

by Philip Sellers December 8, 2013

written by Philip Sellers

I am currently sitting in Myrtle Beach airport waiting for my first of three flights that will ultimate bring me to Barcelona, Spain. I’ll be spending the next week attending HP Discover in Barcelona. It is one of HP’s two major conferences each year and it will be first visit to HP Discover in Europe and on a personal note, my first trip to Europe in thirteen years.

So what to expect from HP Discover?

Some of the usual highlights are expected – the keynote from CEO Meg Whitman to address customers directly and general sessions for HP executives to unpack their vision and product lines for customers and highlight some of the successes the company is achieving. There will be hundreds of breakout sessions for onsite attendees. The Discovery Zone is the place to visit with hundreds of HP’s top technical staff available to answer questions and explain solutions in detail. Unlike other conferences, HP staffs not just marketing folks in the booth, but also engineers and developers. But if you’re not onsite, keep reading – you can still follow the conference.

What else is expected?

Storage: Last year’s HP Discover brought major news with the introduction of the HP 3PAR StoreServ 7000 series arrays. These ‘baby’ 3PAR arrays have been a big hit in the mid-market storage marketplace. Their introduction converted me and my employer into HP 3PAR users. I’ll be interested to hear what’s new in 3PAR. In June at Discover, HP announced the 3PAR StoreServ 7450 array – an all flash variant of the already successful 3PAR StoreServ 7400. But HP 3PAR is just part of the HP Storage story – and there will likely be other things going on around software-defined storage during the week.

Systems: HP created the HP Converged Systems group in May. This August, during VMworld, HP held a reception for bloggers and media where we were briefed by the newly formed group and the Converged Systems group is responsible for full system solutions made out of HP intellectual property, similar to VirtualSystem, CloudSystem and AppSystem solutions we’ve seen delivered to date. This will be their first chance to show fruit during the week.

Servers: HP Servers group was also announced in May as HP combined its Business Critical and Industry Standard Server groups. It will also be the first show for this group since their combination this year, since June’s HP Discover happened immediately after the announcement. In previous years, there have been a lot of bleedover between Business Critical and Industry Standard, back and forth. From the industry standard server side, HP ProLiant Gen8 continues to roll out models to complete its refresh cycle and some ProLiants are now in their second revision. HP Discover in June brought the announcement of the HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 which I have since had a chance to review in depth. Excited to see what’s new here…

Mobile: I’m also interested to see what more HP is doing in the mobile space. In the past year, HP has been toying with Android based hardware, Windows 8 based tablets and has other groups working on enterprise mobility solutions. One solution that I saw in June – called HP Anywhere – was in a early beta form. It allowed developers to have a secure platform and SDK for developing rich HTML5 applications for Enterprise. Mobile is a growing space and I am curious what HP has been developing in this space to help enterprise retain control of data, secure and enable users.

But I’m not there – how can I participate?

I know most people who read Techazine will not be on-site at HP Discover Barcelona. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t participate. Here are some opportunities for the next week for your to participate online:

HP Storage Press Event – Monday, 9am EST – http://hpstorage.me/1buyzV4 – Register online and attend for free to watch the announcements from HP Storage live.

HP Discover Opening Keynote featuring Meg Whitman, CEO, and Bill Veghte, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Group – Tuesday, 8am EST – http://bit.ly/1bQrhNz
HP Discover General Session featuring George Kadifa, Executive Vice President, HP Software; Mike Nefkens, Executive Vice President, Enterprise Services; and Dion Weisler, Executive Vice President, Printing and Personal Systems – Wednesday, 8am EST – http://bit.ly/1aLQfr9
Live and on-demand videos all throughout the week on a variety of topics – http://bit.ly/1fa5lf3

On Twitter, follow hashtag #HPDiscover
Follow @HPStorageGuy – Calvin Zito’s HP Discover Barca Bloggers list on Twitter – https://twitter.com/HPStorageGuy/lists/discover-barca-bloggers and talk with us – ask questions and interact.

Hope to hear from you!

December 8, 2013 0 comment

Compute Datacenter Storage Trends

HP shares Big Data directions

by Philip Sellers September 16, 2013

written by Philip Sellers

bigdatalarge A couple weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend a Big Data briefing from HP Chief Technologist for Data Management, Greg Battas. Battas is part of the newly formed Converged Systems group in HP. He was a pioneer of Very Large Databases (VLDBs) and analytics in the telecom industry who has worked in business intelligence and analytics for a couple decades. He speaks internationally on topics of data integration and holds several patents in the areas of Relations Database, parallel query optimization and real time infrastructure architectures.

Coming from a mid market company, Big Data seems like a problem that doesn’t affect me. Its a concept I have a difficult time wrapping my head around, and for that reason, I’ve not written about it in the past. But it seems that Big Data is more than just a buzzword of the year and there is a lot of innovation occurring around Big Data in attempts to solve customer problems with these datasets.

So, what is Big Data? Wikipedia seems to sum it up best by saying “Big data is the term for a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications.” That helps.

So within the realm of Big Data, you begin to think about supercomputers, hyper-scale arrays of servers and new innovations like in-memory databases. So where is this going and what’s happening in Big Data today?

Direction: Consolidation of Clusters

Big Data Architectures in the past were based around very simple servers with direct attached storage. It leads to a first Hadoop cluster, then a second, third and fourth. A lot of the thought in Big Data was movement away from proprietary storage and databases with parallel programming and distributed file systems like Google File System on standard hardware. Common wisdom dictates that big data depends on massive IO to read huge amounts of data from disk and to optimize this you move compute closer to the data to reduce overhead. There are certain operations that benefit from being pushed down to the same location as the data.

In reality, what has been learned from Big Data workloads is that only a portion of the processing can be close to the data. Keeping data and compute local to one another is actually difficult and does not always result in optimal performance because the data may not be in the appropriate form for processing and may need to be shuffled or reduced. In addition, its observed that the majority of CPU power is still needed for analytics and aggregation. And when most work is done in-memory, the storage really doesn’t apply. This becomes particularly important with NVRAM and other persistent RAM technologies in the future. What all this allows is for the consolidation and re-tasking of clusters to meet multiple needs.

Direction: Software Defined Storage

Big Data workloads, particularly the largest datasets in the world, are running on distributed file systems on industry standard server hardware. These are parallel file systems rather than traditional storage arrays or databases. Hadoop Distributed File System is becoming a very common interface across multiple platforms and deployments and vendors are adopting HDFS and integrating it under their technologies. Today, there is a mix of proprietary and open source technologies.

HP is observing a lot of vendors running their proprietary systems on top of the HDFS, or a very similar parallel filesystem. HP’s internal blueprint with HAVEn is much the same. HAVEn has the unstructured data of Autonomy, the structured analytics of Vertica and running it on top of the HDFS. In addition to storage, the HDFS allows for data to be passed from one tool to another.

Direction: NoSQL is being adopted by a lot of software partners

The first wave of Big Data was around Batch where Hadoop was used for analytics and ETL offloading. It was often coupled with a company’s SQL databases. There is a growing interest in NoSQL products from independent software vendors because of a large dependence on the traditional database vendors. ISVs are seeing a large portion of their total sales being directed back to a database vendor at the close of a sale, so many are beginning to move their commercial products onto NoSQL products that do not require the large costs. It isn’t without challenges, since there is no longer a SQL interface or transaction management to move onto a NoSQL product that no longer requires the large costs of traditional databases. But there are several with active projects porting their products onto a NoSQL product like Hbase.

Direction: Shift to optimized hardware

With a specialized workload like Big Data, there is opportunity for tuning and tailoring hardware to specifically handle the work better than industry standard hardware. Within HP, Moonshot is one example of hardware that is hyper-scale, simple node architecture suited for Big Data (I previously covered Moonshot here). On each cartidge, co-processors or GPU’s could be added to better handle big data workloads, but there is even possibilities within the system-on-a-chip on the cartridge.

Battas mentioned the idea of Dark Silicon, or un-used and un-powered transistors within today’s chips. Today, the industry has the capability of packing on more transistors into a piece of silicon than we have connections to power, leaving them dark. But the interesting idea is tailoring the dark silicon cores to handle a specific task well and then rotating the customized core in and out of use to increase efficiency. This is a particularly interesting topic, enough so that I have written a second post today about dark silicon.

September 16, 2013 0 comment

Datacenter Storage

HP’s Tom Joyce talks converged infrastructure and HP’s new Converged Systems Group

by Philip Sellers July 29, 2013

written by Philip Sellers

Like most things, IT concepts tend to be cyclical. Many years ago, Windows and Linux on x86 hardware changed the course of purpose-built solutions, moving customers to what became industry standard servers. Before them, customers bought proprietary hardware with proprietary storage and proprietary software. Now, the complexities of deploying industry standard servers are moving customers back to optimized, purpose-built solutions for particular problems to streamline deployment time and optimize performance.

IT professionals agree that anything done in a purpose-built converged system can also be accomplished with off-the-shelf components, but HP says customers want converged systems for two critical reasons – speed and agility. HP’s converged solutions are targeted to help customers deploying specific software packages get a very tailored hardware solution to run their software package on a very short timeline with high performance.

Last month, Tom Joyce, senior vice president and general manager of Converged Systems, stopped by the bloggers lounge at HP Discover to talk with us about future directions in converged systems. Convergence is a topic that HP has been talking about for the last 5 years, but HP is also realigning its business practices behind the converged system, announcing in April that it was forming the Converged Systems Group.

So, what makes a converged system? According to Joyce, Converged Solutions include four components:

Server
Storage

Networking
Integrated Management

HP is seeing a lot of opportunity in the mid-market around converged systems. A lot of mid-market customers still have silos where virtualization can really benefit them, but the typical mid-market customers do not have the benefit of a lot of staffing according to Joyce, so HP is working to integrate solutions to make the solution easier to use, manage and maintain. And while some converged systems are created around single products, some of HP’s portfolio has been created around customer choice – with HP VirtualSystem being a prime example. HP has created the VirtualSystem platform to accommodate multiple hypervisors, allowing the customer to choose what’s best for their business.

A lot of discussion in the lounge centered around what makes converged solutions different from off-the-shelf components – and the consensus from both bloggers and Joyce is that the integrated management component is critical to the converged solution. In HP’s case its Insight Control and Insight Management are the key tools in the portfolio today, but Joyce says the management solutions are definitely going towards ‘a much richer experience.’

HP’s Factory Express seems to be a competitive differentiator when it comes to converged solutions, as well. Joyce talked with the bloggers about First Data Corporation, a financial services company that writes software for banking. First Data utilized HP and specifically the Factory Express capabilities to create a package system that includes a customer load of software for First Data’s customers. Rather than the company having to become infrastructure experts and order, assemble and then ship and deliver infrastructure solutions to their customers, they work with HP to create a converged solution with their custom software to deliver to customers, relying on HP to assemble the solution.

Much of the focus with creating converged systems within HP is centered around an optimized configuration of hardware and software around a software solution – whether its Microsoft Exchange, a hypervisor, or a high-end solution like SAP HANA. These optimized solutions are created with the use-case in mind. They also come with some sort of enabling software from HP to streamline the deployment process and decrease the time of deployment for the customer.

When talking about the support organization at HP, Joyce admitted there is some work to be done there. From personal experiences with converged solutions, HP’s support group can be cumbersome to navigate – resulting in the customer being bounced from group to group before finding the proper resource to fix a solution. This is disheartening to a customer who has been presented a sales presentation of a unified solution only to find its supported piecemeal.

July 29, 2013 0 comment

Datacenter Storage

HP Discover 2012: Decrease time to value with HP AppSystem solutions

by Philip Sellers June 5, 2012

written by Philip Sellers

Five click and you’re in business. That’s the value pitch for HP’s AppSystem product offerings for various database and software products I received from Martin Whittaker, Vice President of Systems and Solutions Engineering. And given the amount of time that I’ve invested and seen my coworkers invest into bringing various solutions online, there is an incredible amount of value to be had for deploying systems using purpose-built solutions. Five clicks.

Of course, this is all accomplished through the incredible amount of work that HP has done in investing in automation and these solutions are built on the expertise that they have gleaned from hundreds of thousands of implementations of these various software packages under their belt.

HP AppSystem products are single SKU product solutions that are vertically integrated hardware, storage, networking and software which is purpose-built for a specific application. Just as benchmark systems are carefully built to specifically perform well on the benchmarking tests, these solutions are purpose built to provide the best performance and improved time to value.

HP has released two new AppSystem offerings – AppSystem for Apache Hadoop and AppSystem for SAP HANA. Both of these new offerings are centered around the difficulties of storage and analytics of big data sets. Apache Hadoop is an implementation of Google’s MapReduce and Google File System papers that tackles the issue of storage for large data sets across multiple nodes and then allows them to be interpreted into usable information. The SAP HANA solution is about doing in-memory database analytics at near-realtime results of large data sets.

These new solutions joins an impressive set of specific use-case solutions for Microsoft SQL Server for consolidation of database servers and for data analysis, Microsoft Exchange messaging solutions, Microsoft Lync unified communication, and Vertica data analytics solutions. To learn more about AppSystems and the ideas behind all of them, check out this video from HP:

Disclosure: HP sponsored my trip to HP Discover, covering all travel expenses, however HP does not control the content of the posts that I write based on my attendance to the show. The thoughts, impressions and information contained in this post are my own.

June 5, 2012 0 comment

Datacenter Networking Storage

Converging network with HP FlexFabric and FlexManagement

by Philip Sellers August 22, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

This week, we shine the spotlight on network convergence and management in the FlexNetwork portfolio, specifically the HP Virtual Connect FlexFabric modules and the Intelligent Management Control (IMC) software. Networking is generally not my forte, so some of this is a stretch for me, but I use and understand Virtual Connect. FlexFabric is an implementation of Virtual Connect while IMC has been branded as FlexManagement in the portfolio and is used to encompass management for all of the FlexNetwork portfolio.

Some Basics on Virtual Connect

FlexFabric is a particular type of Virtual Connect module and fits into the FlexNetwork portfolio. Virtual Connect attempts to address many problems, but primarily it is about reducing the amount of physical wiring and switch ports required to cable a blade system, about reducing human-caused errors due to complex cabling, and about adding the ability to pre-wire the entire enclosure for life and pre-allocate all Ethernet and SAN requirements during first install.

August 22, 2011 4 comments