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Converged Infrastructure

Achieving just-in-time performance & scalability at a lower capital cost: theCloud – a CI Case Study

rparker| October 5, 2012
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Case Studies-theCloud.jpgAs I continue to share how HP customers are benefiting from HP Converged Infrastructure, I started down the path of blogging about customers where virtualization plays a role in their solution. I chose this topic because we are finding that most organizations are still in the consolidation / virtualization phase of their convergence / cloud journey.

 

In this case, I chose a company that provides hosted services: theCloud. theCloud caters to small and medium businesses in New Zealand. They provide both self-service tools to enable their customers to deploy infrastructure and software services on demand and they provide a highly elastic, virtualization environment for customers to host their special projects or create new services, faster.

 

theCloud is in an industry where nothing stands still, thus, to accommodate their fast growth, theCloud needed a more scalable, redundant storage and computing infrastructure. To that end, they evaluated solutions from Dell, Cisco, and HP, ultimately choosing HP.

 

With virtualization key for delivering the required agility and ultimate customer satisfaction, the refreshed computing environments at theCloud are all virtualized using VMware vSphere 4; with HP technologies providing the infrastructure. At its Auckland data center, they deployed an HP BladeSystem c7000 chassis with HP ProLiant BL460c Server Blades. The chassis, servers, and HP 3PAR storage are interconnected by HP Virtual Connect FlexFabric 10Gb/24-port Modules. At its Hamilton data center, the company deployed HP ProLiant Servers connected to the HP 3PAR directly through the Fibre Channel. It backs data up to disk using Ving, and then to tape using HP LTO-5 Ultrium Tape Libraries. Plus, theCloud is using HP Systems Insight Manager and HP Insight Control to manage their environment.

 

Plus, to speed deployment, the solution was put together using HP Factory Express with HP Technology Services there to make sure all expectations are fully met. In fact, Bruce Trevarthen, CEO theCloud, is quoted as saying: “What we get from HP is superb account management and superb support from technical resources. We can just pick up the phone and have candid conversations about what our needs are, and that’s just something we didn’t experience with other vendors, so hats off to HP.”

 

All the HP technologies ‘designed for convergence’ are what bring exponential value to theCloud, but 3PAR is what really stood out in this case based on their hosted services business model. The primary reason they chose HP 3PAR was that it wanted the ability to change its storage environment to meet customer demand without disrupting service. HP 3PAR and the 3PAR Mesh-Active technology gave theCloud what they needed with the ability to maintain 100% uptime. In the words of Bruce Trevarthen ...

 

     “We chose HP 3PAR for the storage level because with the central servers in
      a cloud environment, we needed the scalability, resilience, and performance
      the 3PAR provides”

 

     “The combination of the HP 3PAR and the Virtual Connect FlexFabric offers
      us an extremely fluid environment that enables us to respond immediately
      to any change in customer demand.”

 

All-in-all, theCloud has the performance and scalability they need at a lower capital cost, make changes on the fly without disrupting service, enable competitive pricing to help support business growth, and ensure customer confidence by providing guaranteed resilience – all things that are an intrinsic in the HP Converged Infrastructure promise.

 

To explore more details about this customer, I invite you to read the full theCloud Case Study.

 

Thanks for your time,

Russ

 

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NOTE: The numbers and benefits in all our Converged Infrastructure case studies are not HP claims. They are the actual results reported by the company being profiled.

Tags: hp| HP Discover| HPCI
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