The reality of long term server costs vs. short term prices

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Guest blog written by David Chetham-Strode, HP WW Product Manager, Data Center Power Solutions

Hewlett-Packard

For years manufacturers have been trying to take costs out of servers, cutting a dollar here and a dollar there just to save on the purchase price.  The problem is that it costs a lot more than a couple of bucks to implement, configure, and maintain servers.  Many cost cutting efforts, while well intentioned usually ended up increasing the overall administrative and operating costs. The introduction of the HP ProLiant Gen8 self-sufficient servers change this dynamic!  

Designed from the ground up to reduce long term costs associated with running a data center, the HP ProLiant Gen8 servers are easier to install and easier to maintain than any other server in the market.  As an example Location Discovery Services and Power Discovery Service are new technologies that speed deployment and automatically track assets while eliminating many human errors.

Want to know where servers are located? In which rack and even at what location inside that rack?  HP Location Discovery Services does just that.  It automatically tells the HP iLO embedded management processor which U space the server is located in and in which rack as soon as it is mounted in an HP Intelligent Series Rack with Location Discovery Services.  Information can then be rolled up into data center software such as HP’s Insight Control or even to HP’s Intelligent PDU (iPDU).  The end result—no more tedious and time consuming manual recording to track inventory.  This means that when there’s is a problem or and alert from a Gen8 server administrators know exactly which server and where it is without cross referencing manually generated records.  Inventory is also tracked automatically if it  changes locations. 

Power Discovery Services takes this a step further.  When an HP ProLiant Gen8 server is plugged into an HP Intelligent PDU, the iPDU records the server ID information along with Rack and U location, from Location Discovery Services, in its onboard database. The HP iPDU also check to make sure that HP Gen8 servers with redundant power supplies are actually plugged into redundant iPDUs to prevent unexpected down time, whether it’s the first installation of the server or simply re-plugging it in after maintenance months or even years later.

Now this all sounds simple and many times I’ve heard the response “We do it all by hand to insure accuracy.”  But when asked who does the manual recording and entry the answer is almost always “the interns” and in the case of one University, “freshmen” did all the manual labor and recording.  Now I don’t know about you, but I would not have wanted to be responsible for tracking all datacenter assets when I was a freshman…  My how times have changed…

Bottom line is that whether it is the initial installation of a new rack of servers and the potential hundreds of data points being recorded or change management during the life of the data center HP Location and Power Discovery Services automates and reduces hours of tedious data recording and entry to minutes while eliminating the human errors that can cause downtime.

To learn how HP ProLiant Gen8 servers and a host of additional breakthroughs can help you transform your data center economics, read: Four ways to achieve a self-sufficient infrastructure.