Hopefully by now you will have started to pick up some basic understanding about what HP is trying to drive around it's new Converged Infrastructure strategy. You will have read that IT sprawl is taking business performance to the breaking point and that 70% of most IT budgets are being spent on operations, and that a shrinking 30% is spent on innovation. This was neatly summarized recently by David Hughes, SAS Vice President International Sales, who stated, “it is going to be increasing more important to be able to leverage complexity as opposed to becoming a victim of it, in a cost constrained environment. This is a growing trend for SAS customers.”  (Reference: Technology at Work press day, in Frankfurt Germany on April 26th, 2010).

HP Converged Infrastructure strategy attacks IT sprawl head on, as it takes an holistic approach to datacenter issues, enabling business to tackle the problems of application, server, storage and network which currently inhibits today’s business agility. For more information check out www.hp.com/go/ci

This is a great approach from HP, but what would a pessimistic view look like from an industry analyst perspective. Would the HP strategy hold up against what industry analysts are predicting? I had the opportunity to hear this POV from a leading industry analyst – Andy Butler from Gartner, who presented at the Technology at Work conference in Frankfurt Germany.

Andy summarized that the current datacenter  – compute, storage and management are all seen as separate stacks by design. This has created multiple islands, all gated by physical clusters, each having very different limitations. This in turn as has led to slower, more siloed and costly deployments for IT to manage.

Andy defines change happening in the follow key areas:

• Virtualization – The engine room for infrastructure transformation


• Management Tools – The emerging battle ground for control and collaboration


• Infrastructure Convergence – built upon a fabrics based architecture

This fabrics based architecture will comprise of a set of compute, storage, memory and I/O components joined through a common Fabric interconnect.

The Promise
A Fabrics based architecture will enable you to:

• Only buy what you need when you need them


• Wire once and reconfigure many times


• The capability to manage from a more holistic standpoint across the fabric

A prediction into the future
Andy predicted that by 2012, 30% of global 2,000 datacenters will be equipped with some fabric based bladed architecture

• Corollary 1.  90% of these Fabric systems will employ virtualization


• Corollary 2.  15% of these Fabric systems will be utilized for cloud infrastructures and Services (a gradual trend that will move into the datacenter over the next 5 – 10 years)

Andy’s conclusions

• Start now and assess the number of Server platforms you currently have within your datacenters


• Know what you have so you can start to plan around and prepare for a future Fabrics based computing environment


• Multiple influences are driving the server market towards an x86 architecture, with smaller forma factors and modular fabrics

If you are running SPARC severs and are looking to improve total cost of ownership for your business critical UNIX environment - look no further than the new HP Integrity servers recently introduced.  In conjunction with this introduction last week, we have developed a new cost of ownership tool that has been posted on the TCO Challenge site.  This new TCO tool shows the cost advantages of moving to an HP Integrity blades infrastructure from a legacy SPARC-based rackmount environment.

I was doing some analysis the other day and came up with some interesting results.  I ran a report for what I consider to be a typical Sun SPARC legacy environment on the Blades TCO tool  - it consisted of two legacy 32-core SPARC servers running the database and eight  4-core application servers. 

The answer that came back was that you could run all the workloads with a single sixteen core HP Integrity BL870c i2 server on an HP BladeSystem.  And you get the mission criticaly capabilities of HP-UX 11i with it. 

Here are the results I got:

Core count reduction:  96 to 16 (that's 6 to 1)

Three Year Cumulative TCO Savings (total):  $4.47 million to $683,000

Return on Investment: 1747%

Payback Period;  3 months

If I were running my business critical operations older Sun SPARC servers, I would definitely take a look at moving to HP Integrity blades.  And there still would be slots available on the HP BladeSystem to put in Integrity or ProLiant blades. 

Last week, we had a training event for some of our internal as well as partner reps out here in California. One of the topics that I got to present multiple times was Greener UNIX.

I have asked the question, multiple times, about which has a higher importance: increasing server density, or allowing systems to take up more physical room but consuming less power. While I often get a mixed response, with the economy starting to recover, the answer was almost anonymous "help me get more stuff in my datacenter."

Most customers seem to like higher density - but hate the idea that while they might get much more performance, they might only deploy half full racks (preferably with blanking panels in them) since they can only power or cool at a certain density. You get more performance, smaller footprint, and a  much better price/performance, performance/watt, and performance/space. Hopefully the half full racks become less of an issue.

I also learned a few things, and got reminders about others:

• Each watt saved on components has a significant multiplier - often >2.5x - by the time you get to the overall power and cooling draw.


• High Efficiency power supplies, such as those used by HP BladeSystem and other HP servers, are great - but may save a few percent of system power usage. Turning on CPU power management, such as Green Active processors in HP-UX, has a much bigger impact on the total power usage than a more efficient power supply.


• At least some of the people who work with customers mentioned that their customers are aware of the power savings features in HP-UX and on HP Integrity servers - even if they haven't implemented them yet. Implementation would be better, but at least people are talking about it.

Needless to say, there was talk around the Intel Itanium 9300 (aka Tukwila) announcement. I've seen some comments on the blog that people want to know about which servers will include these processors. The one comment, from the Intel press release, is "OEM systems are expected to ship within 90 days."

And on a personal note, I'm definitely enjoying the Olympics. However, having been born and raised in Canada, I'm happy to see the Canadian men's hockey team starting to have more success. The games against the Swiss and Team USA, my current home, were stressful to me as a fan. However, after dispatching the Russian team yesterday, I'm hoping to see a Canada and USA rematch - in the gold medal game.

Jacob

 It's February 1, and with a new month comes a new promotion. If you are an IBM or Sun UNIX customer, and are interested in taking a look at HP Integrity blades and HP-UX, we have a new offer for you. It is a Free HP Integrity Blade Starter Kit - basically, a free BL860c - when HP-UX 11i v3 VSE OE and support are purchased from HP. This offer is for new customers only. More details are available at http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/w1/en/migrate-to-hp/from-sun-starter-kit.html.

Jacob

It certainly have been a busy day around here, at least for posting to the blog.

Another interesting piece of information just made it into my e-mail inbox. HP is in the process of updating its web site, and you'll see changes show up over the next year or so. However, one that impacts HP bloggers, is that we're moving to a different platform (Lithium) for our social media and community pages. One of the first new community forums on the platform is the Blade Connect Community Blogs. If you want to see what this blog will look like in the future, have at it.

Jacob