Can your business focus on innovation and drive business growth? With HP Converged Infrastructure it can.
To accelerate business growth and produce higher-quality products and services, your IT organization must innovate. As in many companies throughout the world, we, at HP, are deep in the process of planning for Fiscal Year 2012. With the review of business performance for 2011 staring us in the face, the economy times still in flux, coupled with uncertainty around the world, having business goals and revenues that call for growth for 2012 becomes a challenging task. There is always the “top-down” vision and goals by executive management that meet the “bottoms-up” capabilities that the sales, marketing, and engineering teams face each day. Somewhere in the middle of all of this is the IT team that will be tasked with the responsibility to implement the services, applications, security, and reliability to make it all come together.
It’s difficult to support the business goals and objectives with new innovative services, when your IT team members spend the bulk of their time wrestling with legacy infrastructure. By some estimates, 70 percent of IT budgets go to operations and maintenance, leaving just 30 percent for innovation. This is hardly the time to have the IT department purely viewed as a cost center and not a key member of the strategic business plan. They must be ready to make things happen in support of the overall business 2012 objectives. This is especially true during tough economic times. Tough times call for workable solutions and when:
Converged Infrastructure helps you flip the “maintenance – innovation” ratio—and focus more on the innovation side that helps drive the business forward. The data center becomes a configurable set of resources that can be automatically assigned to meet the changing needs of the business. Departmental or customer requests for new and innovative services can be requested, available resources automatically determined, automatically provisioned, and automatically released when the service is no longer needed. This is how to innovate. This is how to support the business. These are the times, tough times, when flexibility, resource utilization, and data center optimization keep you in business. Beat the competition, take market share, and grow when growth seems like a distant vision, not something that can happen in Fiscal 2012.
One of the essential foundational elements of the Converged infrastructure lies in the capabilities provided by the Virtual Connect technology. This is the area that I work in at HP. This was and continues to be an innovative technology that came out of the data center need for change to help address the issues that came with the “Dawn of Virtualization”. The server edge is one of the most complex areas of today’s infrastructure, with the most server to server traffic and congestion. The growing demand for virtual servers and applications and their various networking needs creates a sprawl of wires, adapter cards, switches, special software, and administrative processes that is out of control. Virtual Connect (VC) FlexFabric modules provide a new solution to this problem that replaces traditional switches and modules with a converged and virtualized way to connect servers to any network with one device, over one wire.
What if one server network port could provide four physical connections so that you could precisely control bandwidth to the needs of each application or virtual server? What if you could create and store the server’s LAN or SAN connection profile and apply it to another server anywhere in the data center without touching a cable, changing settings, or touching the network settings—all with a few simple clicks? What if for every new server you added, moved, or replaced, the infrastructure was ready to go when you plugged it in and powered it up? And what if you could do it all with familiar industry standards and manage it centrally with minimal administration?
The Virtual Connect FlexFabric modules and FlexFabric adapters enable a unique and simple way to make your system administrators more self-sufficient. They can move workloads and add, move, or replace server blades without impacting network settings or requiring multiple administrative domain experts at each step. The first interconnect technology built for the demands of Converged Infrastructure, Virtual Connect FlexFabric modules can connect servers and virtual machines to data and storage networks, over Ethernet, Fibre Channel (FC), and iSCSI protocols, with just one interconnect and no mezzanine cards. Then add, move, and change those connections in minutes instead of days. Virtual Connect FlexFabric modules are also built on the unique Virtual Connect Flex-10 capability to allocate and fine-tune network bandwidth for both data and storage connections to make sure that each connection is provisioned just right.
These capabilities were what the doctor ordered when putting together the Converged Infrastructure that could provision resources in minutes, not days, automate the provisioning of services on demand, and provide a flexing of the data center to meet business needs as never before.
How do you determine whether this is what your company needs? Begin with a deep look at where you are today. Successful converged infrastructure deployments begin with self-examination and goals-definitions read Assess your readiness for a converged infrastructure. HP addresses your current needs as well as your needs as they evolve – we are your source for Instant-On Solutions.
