Have you ever noticed that the more powerful technology is—the more efficient and cost-effective it becomes (sort of like a self-fulfilling prophecy)?   That’s why upgrading to the latest HP Integrity servers makes so much sense.  Just ask Steelcase, the global office furniture manufacturer.

The question often comes up – what makes an application or workload mission critical?   The answer is easy – if the application is vital to your business, then it is mission critical.   I was looking for examples of Integrity customers who have upgraded their mission-critical systems to newer infrastructure and found an interesting story.  This particular customer relies on SAP, with ERP being the bread and butter to the organization and vital to the success of the company.

Coming into big events like HP Discover there is a lot of focus on announcing new products, technologies and strategies for our customers, analysts and press.  But perhaps consistency in mission critical is better than new and constantly changing.

Our HP engineers took a fresh look at the most prevalent challenges IT managers are facing today -- data center complexity and management costs consuming too much darn budget.  That would be enough of a challenge on its own, but our Integrity engineers also need to ensure that any solutions proposed account for the fact that these types of systems strive to never go down and must always be available to handle the most challenging, mission-critical workloads.  What’s a better way to deal with these problems given the extra requirements in a mission-critical environment?  The engineering team took the renowned resiliency of the Superdome along with the efficiencies of blades, combined them and created Superdome 2. 

In Part 1 of this Meet the Builder series, I introduced you to Arlen Roesner.  Arlen  provided a demonstration of the common modular infrastructure of our new Superdome 2 platform.   Today I’d like to share a demonstration of the Flex Fabric and resilience innovations packed into Superdome 2, our flagship for the Integrity line of servers.  Wendy Wiehardt, Hardware Design Engineer in our Enterprise Systems Lab also helped create Superdome 2.   In this video, she demonstrates how easy it really is to scale up with Integrity systems.  You can start with a single cell, 2 socket system and scale up to 8 cells and 16 sockets, all in a single enclosure.  If you need even more processing power than that you can connect two enclosures together, and create a 32 socket complex all in a single rack – now that makes life easier.  Wendy also shows you what’s inside the blades, digging into the components such as new Intel Itanium 9300 series processors, NICs, built in I/O, VPARs, DIMM slots, iLO and more.  Superdome 2 is also designed to be easier to manage and more resilient than ever before with over 100 new innovations built in to ensure against downtime.  Our engineers know you don’t want to deal with the hassle and risk of rebooting systems, so she explains more about the numerous resiliency enhancements, and pulls out and replaces a crossbar without having to reboot the system.  Please take a few moments to check out Wendy's demo:

Let us know what you think of our new systems, and what else you’d like to hear about from our engineers.  If you’d like more detailed information I encourage you to check out our main Integrity site.

I’ll share Part 3 of this series in a couple of days.  Hope you find the demos informative.

~Cynthia

I’d like to share with you some information straight from our engineering team about our new HP Integrity servers that we announced at the end of April.  In this first video, Arlen Roesner, lead mechanical engineer in our HP Enterprise Systems Lab, talks about the common modular infrastructure of the new Superdome 2 platform.  He discusses how it is built on the new Blade Scale architecture,  reducing the number of individual components a data center needs to certify and carry, helping customers save considerable money and time.  Arlen demonstrates the commonality of the C7000 platform and the Superdome 2 platform including use of the same onboard administrator, common power supplies, cooling and more – watch him swap a few items out in this video to show how easy it is to do, even while the system is powered on.

If you struggle with the issues associated with having lots of different platforms running on different operating systems to support a vast array of specific applications in your business, we invite you to check out HP’s new way of thinking – mission-critical converged infrastructure.   Please tell us what you think, and what else you’d like to hear about from our HP engineering team.

I’ll be posting other engineering videos in the next few days.