Getting to Shared Services with HP BladeSystem Matrix

What is the best way to deliver infrastructure and application services more quickly and consistently? How will shared services impact their IT infrastructure?

Learn how you can get infrastructure by the pound, a ready to run infrastructure, when you need it.

Join our live webcast on November 19, 8:00 – 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time, with Illuminata Principal IT Advisor, Jonathan Eunice, and HP Chief Blade Strategist, Gary Thome, as they discuss the business and technology implications of shared services delivery. 

To register, visit http://hpbroadband.com/program.aspx?key=111909Matrix.

By Nick van der Zweep

Director of Product Management, HP Insight Software

I hope you’ve heard some of the recent noise we’ve made around key enhancements to our Converged Infrastructure story.  If not, I urge you to check out the news.  We’re accelerating the creation of the industry’s first ‘Infrastructure Operating Environment’ with several cool enhancements to our HP Insight Software portfolio.  Swifter, higher, stronger…! 

As you might guess, Insight Software portfolio plays a critical role and I’m pleased to share several great enhancements for both Insight Control and Insight Dynamics.  We’re now delivering even more value with our 2 core offerings:  Insight Control for essential server management and Insight Dynamics for advanced infrastructure management. Insight Control now includes unlimited server migrations to streamline consolidation.  Likewise, Insight Dynamics now includes infrastructure orchestration and recovery management.  Finally, both Insight Control and Insight Dynamics now include the System Center and vCenter integration resulting from our joint development with Microsoft and VMware ensuring our customers receive the ProLiant and BladeSystem experience they’ve come to expect regardless of their management platform.

Provisioning is another area we’ve concentrated on this round.  Just one cool thing to mention is the ability to provision more than just infrastructure. We now have the ability to provision applications on top of the infrastructure as well. We do this by integrating with HP Server Automation.

 We also want you to be able to optimize your Converged Infrastructure confidently.  Hence, some key enhancements to our capacity planning arena, the main thrust of which is making the whole process faster and even more aligned to business.  We’ve added a host of useful reports that allow you to spot the most likely consolidation candidates, give you a big picture view of how much resources all the workloads are consuming, and even figure our how much each is using to more easily slip into a charge-back process.  

Last-but-not-least is trying to help customers save on disaster recovery costs by now allowing disaster recovery to either a physical or a virtual machine.  You can imagine how this could be appealing in-so-far as you can pack way more applications into virtual machines which could be perfectly OK in a DR scenario.

All of this means that we’re make it easier to manage your Converged Infrastructure:  to make disaster recovery more affordable, expand and simplify the provisioning capabilities, and make consolidation more precise and faster.  So maybe I’m stretching the analogy but it makes me think of that great, concise Olympics motto:  Swifter, higher, Stronger!

We've been on the Adaptive Infrastructure journey at HP for several years now.  This week we are announcing an important milestone: BladeSystem Matrix.  We've been really thinking a lot about how customers use IT and ways we can optimize IT infrastructure to make it work better for them.  We recognize that infrastructure exists for applications, which exist for the business.  So we've taken a business and application perspective on how an infrastructure ought to operate.

Deploying an application typically requires an IT architect or team of architects to carefully design the entire infrastructure - servers, storage, network, virtual machines - and then hand off the design to a team of people to deploy, which typically takes several weeks.  This length of time is mostly an artifact of the way IT infrastructure is designed.  So we decided to change this with BladeSystem Matrix.  Now an architectural design is saved out as a template - servers, storage, virtual machines, network, server software image.  Then when it is time to provision an application, it's as easy as saying "make it so" - and in a matter of minutes, the Matrix's converged virtualized infrastructure is automatically configured and the application is ready to run.  In other words, the way it ought to be.

BladeSystem Matrix is the culmination of several years work at HP - creating an Adaptive Infrastructure that is simpler to buy, deploy and keep running optimally.  Applications are easier to provision, maintain, and migrate.  We've spent years proving out this architecture, not just in our labs but in real-world environments, with BladeSystem, Virtual Connect, and Insight Software - so we could learn how IT really operates - and more importantly - how it ought to operate.

Some people tell me Matrix's virtualization sounds sort of like a mainframe.  Others say that the portal interface reminds them of cloud IT.  I guess in a way they are all correct.  But unlike those environments, Matrix will run off-the-shelf x86 applications.  So I guess I've decided that Matrix is it's own thing.

On Monday, April 20^th, we announced a new Virtual Connect family member and expanded capabilities for all Virtual Connect products.  We’ve see a great deal of momentum building behind virtualization and infrastructure convergence - and these enhancements will help our customers better meet their goals.

When customers put applications onto fewer servers with virtualization, they increase the needed density of both data and storage networking.  So, customers not only need server virtualization, but they also need to virtualize and converge server I/O.   Last November, we introduced the HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 technology that divides a dual-port network interface controller into 8 FlexNIC ports.  This technology reduces the cost associated with data networking in a virtualization environment by greatly reducing the number of cables, switches and additional NICs needed. 

Now we just announced a new Virtual Connect 8 Gb Fibre Channel module to support the heavy SAN needs of virtual servers.   The HP Virtual Connect 8 Gb 24-port Fibre Channel Module has twice the bandwidth of our 4 Gb Fibre Channel module running at up to 8 Gb on all downlinks and uplinks. Second, it has a total of 8 uplink connections, which is double our current module. Third, it features support for increased server side NPIV support with 255 World Wide Names available per server.  So all together more Virtual Machines can be hosted per server and per set of Virtual Connect Ethernet and Fibre Channel modules.  The result is needing fewer servers AND fewer interconnect modules. Fewer servers and interconnect modules mean a lower purchase cost, simpler set-up and ongoing management, and fewer cables, all able to host more application workloads..  More for less works well for everyone.

We added a new Virtual Connect multi-enclosure stacking feature. Multi-enclosure stacking allows up to 4 BladeSystem enclosures to be connected together into one Virtual Connect Domain.  This provides two big benefits. One, it creates a single simple server connection management domain for up to four enclosures, or up to 64 servers. Second, it also means fewer uplink cables to top of rack or core network ports, further reducing cable and expensive core port costs.

We’ve also enhanced Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager.   The new 1.30 release supports our new Virtual Connect 8Gb Fibre Channel Module, our latest G6 server blades announced last month, and extends the number of supported Virtual Connect domains to 200.  When combined with multi-enclosure stacking, this means that Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager can simplify the set-up and ongoing management of server I/O for up to 800 BladeSystem enclosures or put another way, up to 12,800 servers!  Enabling system administrators the ability to manage the connectivity of up to 12,800 servers will go a long way to making life simpler and less expensive for many of our customers.

So for customers looking to converge infrastructure or increase benefits from virtualization, we hope you let HP and our resellers help you save money, reduce your network complexity, and simplify your IT environment with Virtual Connect Ethernet and Virtual Connect Fibre Channel.

 “Connect More - Spend Less!”

Michael Kendall

ESS Virtual Connect