Today’s data centers are often space constrained and challenged by how to power and cool a complex infrastructure.   Often systems are not flexible enough to adapt as business needs change, especially when mission-critical requirements absolutely must be met without fail.  HP’s Blade Link redefines blade scaling by allowing you to really easily join together and manage multiple blades to create 2, 4 and 8 socket systems that best suit your business needs. Shawn Kroeger, Hardware Design Engineer in our Enterprise Systems Lab helped create the new HP Integrity blade servers and demonstrates how simple it is to scale up with Blade Link and reveals some of the benefits realized (9x performance in half the footprint for example!).  Shawn also takes you on a complete tour of inside and out of the new Integrity server blade if you want to dig into the processors, iLO, DIMM slots, NICs and more.

We’ve also included Bruce Henderson from the UNIX systems lab in this video to explain how HP-UX offers optimized performance with the new Integrity servers.  Learn more about 3 key things: 1) Insight Dynamics VSE for maximizing utilization of server resources 2) Serviceguard to maximize availability and service level of resources in your environment and 3) Insight Control Manager to deploy and optimize resources effectively.  Here’s the video:

This is the final blog in my three part Meet the HP Integrity Server Engineers series.  Part 1 addressed the Common Modular Infrastructure and Part 2 digs into Flex Fabric and resiliency enhancements of Integrity.   Each video is under 7 minutes in length.  I hope you find them useful.

Please let us know what else you’d like to hear from our HP Engineers about our mission-critical converged infrastructure.  Comments welcomed!

~Cynthia

I caught Ken
Pomaranski's Superdome
2 technical session at HP Technology @ Work (#HPTAW). He started out by
giving an overview of the key values of the new Superdome 2 server.

Common,
converged platform

• Common management across
  ProLiant and Integrity including BladeSystem Matrix/Insight Dynamics,
  Onboard Administrator, and iLO3.


• Common enclosures and
  spares, which I've already mentioned a few times. It will be a common
  theme this week.

Power-on-once
Technology

• Fault tolerant fabric
  with end-to-end retry for all transactions in the chipset. Every
  transaction is tracked to completion, rerouted through a secondary path if
  needed, and allows independent scaling of I/O and CPU. This allows
  customers to optimize Superdome 2 for their specific workload - whether it
  is CPU intensive or an I/O intensive workload.


• Superdome 2 Analysis
  Engine provides constant monitoring and analysis of system fault data. The
  server also self heals by driving responses to failure - in other words,
  instead of a simple error message, it also suggests how to fix it. If the
  first fix doesn't work, it knows that to try next. It is kind of like
  adding an HP service engineer with every system.


• Online Serviceability
  with tool free hot pluggable components. While we didn't have systems in
  this session, I will say that the tool free demo was impressive during
  Martin Fink's keynote and server tear down demo.

Longevity and
investment protection for the next decade

• Superdome was available
  for 10 years. This platform will take us through quite a few years more.
  There is a stable and committed roadmap for 3 Itanium processor
  generations. It runs HP-UX 11i v3, so applications don't need to be
  re-certified.

Ken got into a
lot more details about the server, including it's architecture. I can't cover
it all here, but if you would like to know more, let me know. It could be a
topic over the next few months. All I know is that it is great to finally be
able to talk and blog about these systems, which we've been working on for
years. Although I think that Ken's enthusiasm level still beats mine!

Jacob

Late last week,
I had the opportunity to spend some time on the phone with a customer who had a
large UNIX install base, but was considering HP and HP-UX 11i v3 for the first
time. The account team was on site, and obviously covered many more topics than
I did during my 45 minutes on the phone. However, I found the customer's
response to what I had to say quite interesting, and it got me thinking about
server design, and real-world customer problems.

While I covered
the whole software portfolio, the customer really had questions about two areas
- our high availability and disaster recovery portfolio, and our orchestration
capabilities. In fact, I ended up going back to our orchestration products multiple
times, just to answer all of their questions. The customer was amazed that HP
Insight Orchestration, as part of our Converged Infrastructure, could automate
such a big part of their day to day provisioning process. To them, this would
help solve a huge operational problem - reducing the ongoing maintenance costs
as part of their overall it budget. This is something HP experienced - reducing
maintenance and operations from 70% of the IT budget and reducing it to around
30% of the IT budget. The first model was making IT unsustainable.

This got me
thinking about the what our customers ask for in new servers. Everyone expects
that the new servers will offer more performance than the previous generation.
Everyone expects that power consumption will drop. These are good
characteristics, but is that all the innovation you want from your server
vendor? A faster chip, but in the same old box - what comes to my mind when I see the new POWER 7 servers.? With the same old maintenance
issues? A vendor who makes great hardware, but looks at customers as support
annunities? A vendor who isn't invested in reducing maintenance as percentage
of your IT budget - solving the big IT problem?

Intel has
released their new Itanium 9300 processor, and HP will announce its new systems
within 90 days. My question: will they just be the same old servers, just with
a faster processor? Or will they be something more for mission critical
environments? Will HP take steps to help our customers dig out from their
maintenance costs? What are you looking for in these new servers?

Jacob