Earlier this month, I had some fun posting a song about private cloud architects, today I’d like to back it up with some materials that may actually be useful.

HP and Microsoft have jointly defined a Departmental Private Cloud Reference Architecture   based on best-in-class HP Converged Infrastructure and Microsoft Windows Server with Hyper-V and System Center. This site may be useful for those going who are closely aligned with Microsoft’s approach to cloud computing.

There is also other reference architecture and materials sites like:

• HP AppSystem for Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse
• HP AppSystems for SAP HANA
• HP AppSystem for Vertica

There are also a few free books at the HP Book Store, including:

• HP FlexNetwork Architecture Guide: Simplicity and performance for tomorrow’s networks
• BYOD and Beyond: Implementing a unified access solution

Recently Gartner put out a press release saying Cloud and CRM will drive enterprise software spending in 2013 and 2014. I found this focus on CRM a bit confusing based on all the other demands on spending. One of the interesting areas is the use of private clouds. HP has some new hardware coming out soon that should be of interest to anyone interested in cloud hardware.

See if moonshot will be right for you. Many of the issues defined as tech trends, should be addressed more effectively and economically by the moonshot approach than traditional hardware. 

It seems like about once a year there is another breakthrough story about graphene and its potential for high performance computing.  A recent paper describes a different transistor construction approach improves the performance-to-leakage ratio (Ion/Ioff) dramatically. This is crucial to lower power and reliable, higher performance. This article in NewScientist U-bend breakthrough for superfast graphene transistors, gives a bit more background for those interested.

New materials and approaches are going to be needed if we’re going to continue to have higher performance computers and not just continue to have more cores applied to problems. Some types of problems can be parallelized effectively, but not all.

On the other hand for those problems that can be broken into parallel execution, the advent of the 16 core Atom based processor may be the foundation for the next generation of data center hardware. I was part of team that took advantage of a structure similar to this in the mid-90s. We front-ended the I/O bound portion of a large ERP system with low cost, multi-core devices, freeing up the backend to do the heavy lifting. It was cheaper, more efficient and scalable. This may fly in the face of some organizations approach to IaaS where all VMs are targeted at the same type hardware but necessary as organizations expect different characteristics.

Today HP is announcing a few offerings building upon the Instant-On Enterprise focus from last fall. There are websites with all the details, but I thought I’d provide the highlights from my perspective.

The announcements introduce the following components:

• HP Enterprise Cloud Services-Compute with the focus on a more agile way of accessing compute resources for organizations. It lets organizations scale their cloud capacity as much as they like within a range that the customer defines. So there is control as well as flexibility. Enterprises can choose between HP-managed or self-managed server packages – so it is more than just a virtual machine in the cloud (if you want it to be). One goal of this effort is to allow businesses to focus on their core goals like gaining market share, improving customer satisfaction, and growing their bottom line, without having to worry about the infrastructure operational details.
• HP CloudSystem: this offering is a complete integrated system to build, manage and consume services across private, public and hybrid cloud environments. It is not just about what is out in the cloud but more of an enterprise integrated approach. This lack of a holistic view has always been a weakness of most cloud offerings (in my opinion). The offerings intelligent resource management capabilities automate the allocation of private and public cloud resources to enable an enterprise to meet cost, performance and compliance goals based on their pre-defined business policies.
• HP Cloud Service Automation is a core management engine for private and public cloud environments. It enables enterprises to manage cloud services with one-touch provisioning and monitoring, include service levels. Too often organizations underestimate the effort required to deploy and manage applications in the cloud. As a result, they often experience costly delays and lose the cloud benefits that they sought in the first place. This tool is focused on addressing these concerns.
• HP Cloud Discovery Workshop is focused on helping an enterprise develop a holistic cloud strategy. It is more of a facilitated exercise where the organization teases out their issues and requirements. By understanding critical success factors, benefits and challenges, it helps organizations make a more informed decision and helps them stay on the right path. It consists of a number of perspectives (or panels) to facilitate discovery. I actually coordinated the creation of the applications panel for this one with a team of folks from HP Enterprise Services.

The overarching theme is to enable organizations to increase their flexibility, visibility and transparent access to a wider range of computing capabilities -- enabling them to free up resources and support other business objectives.

HP and Microsoft Corp. today announced a portfolio of four new converged application appliances that fuse applications, infrastructure and productivity tools into a single system. These solutions help organizations optimize employee productivity and decision-making, while simplifying the delivery of applications for IT. The HP Business Decision Appliance is available now to run business intelligence services, and the HP E5000 Messaging System for Microsoft Exchange Server is planned to be available in 45 days to run messaging services. Two other appliances are expected to be available later this year.

• The HP Business Decision Appliance with three years of HP 24/7 hardware and software support services is available today from HP and HP/Microsoft Frontline channel partners for less than $28,000 (ERP). Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft SharePoint 2010 are licensed separately.
• The HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance with services for site assessment, installation and start-up, as well as three years of HP 24/7 hardware and software support services, is available today from HP and HP/Microsoft Frontline channel partners starting at less than $2 million. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse is licensed separately.
• The HP E5000 Messaging System with three years of HP 24/7 hardware and software support services is expected to be available in March from HP and HP/Microsoft Frontline channel partners starting at $36,000. Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 is licensed separately.

This is all part of a larger view of enabling instant-on enterprise approaches where solutions can be up and running quickly.