HP Expands Converged Infrastructure Portfolio

Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P.P announced the expansion of its Converged Systems offerings including enhancements to the OneView 2.0 management platform, a partnership with Arista Networks, Inc., and a series of workload optimized reference architectures.

These offerings are designed to give customers the flexibility and choice required to transform to a hybrid infrastructure while protecting their current IT investments.

According to IDC, more than 30% of customers are concerned with vendor lock-in or the inability to integrate new systems with current infrastructure and management tools⁽¹⁾. As organizations look to align their data centers with specific workload and application requirements, there’s a need for a converged infrastructure that allows customers to streamline storage, networking and compute assets for greater efficiency and business outcomes while protecting their current IT investments.

“HP is committed to helping our customers transform to a hybrid infrastructure that is built on open systems,” said Ric Lewis, SVP and GM, converged data center infrastructure, HP. “By expanding the reach of our HP OneView platform, we are giving our customers the choice they need to increase the agility and flexibility of their infrastructure in order to compete and grow in an increasingly fast paced business environment.“

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Extend software defined infrastructure management with OneView 2.0
Management continues to play a critical role in the modern data center, but the complexity of tools and the manual processes have often slowed IT service roll-outs and resulted in operational inefficiency. HP OneView unifies processes, user interfaces (UI’s) and the APIs across HP server, storage, and Virtual Connect networking devices. With OneView 2.0 customers can save time and reduce costly errors by automating server change management. New server profile templates make it easy to define firmware and driver baselines as well as server, LAN and SAN settings in one place and consistently provision or update those settings multiple times. Additionally, profile mobility makes it possible to migrate and recover of workloads across server platform types, configurations, and generations.

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OneView 2.0 delivers automation, proactive monitoring and guidance for SANs so administrators can identify and resolve potential SAN issues before they impact the business. Automation for flash-optimized 3PAR StoreServ Storage includes FCoE support in addition to FC for those organizations that are looking to reduce cost through fabric consolidation. OneView proactively identifies and alerts administrators to zoning errors, broken paths and orphaned volumes across the entire SAN and provides configuration reports with guidance to help make the SANs more efficient.

Virtualization Performance Viewer
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OneView users will now also be able to combine OneView’s intimate knowledge of physical infrastructure with VM management from Virtualization Performance Viewer (vPV). This combination allows customers to proactively plan for new capacity requirements, easily understand the impact of maintenance operations, even mitigate configuration risk by detecting how virtualization clusters are striped across BladeSystem enclosures.

Partnership with Arista Networks delivers verified reference architectures
For customers desiring a choice of infrastructure to handle performance-intensive, virtualized and highly dynamic workloads, HP is announcing a new partnership with Arista to reap the benefits of an open converged infrastructure; delivering optimized solutions for today’s dynamic data center environments. The Converged Architecture with Arista enables verified solutions that combine Arista programmable network platforms for efficient networking. Designed to support private, public and hybrid cloud applications, these solutions provide a flexible and open choice across compute and storage, including all-flash solutions with 3PAR StoreServ. The open and flexible solutions deliver simplified provisioning and ongoing maintenance, via the application of Arista Extensible OS (EOS) and network programmable platforms, with OneView integration at its core, which helps reduce operational expense and minimizes the impact on IT staffs.

“The joint reference architectures from HP and Arista will deliver a dramatically simplified path to convergence and cloud-efficiency for our joint customers,” said Ed Chapman, VP, business development and alliances, Arista Networks. “This will allow customers to rapidly realize the benefits of a converged infrastructure to accelerate their business and improve time to value while remaining flexible for future business needs.“

ConvergedSystem 700 for Virtualization

Workload-optimized reference architectures for cloud and mobility
Designing, building, and managing a conventional IT environment that can meet today’s dynamic business needs can be labor intensive and loaded with risk, complexity, and costs. The ConvergedSystem approach enables a high-velocity business model that delivers faster time-to-value, reduces costs and risks, and positions customers to move toward cloud-based models that increase competitive advantage. HP is introducing a series of new workload-optimized reference architectures to support cloud and mobility.

This growing Verified Reference Architecture on ConvergedSystem 700 includes:

Support for client virtualization workloads with Verified Reference Architecture for VDI with Citrix XenDesktop on vSphere
Support for unified communication and collaboration workloads with Verified Reference Architecture for Exchange and SharePoint 2013 and HP Verified Reference Architecture for Microsoft Lync 2013
Support for BC in virtualized workloads with Verified Reference Architecture for DR using 3PAR StoreServ Storage, VMware vCenter SRM, and HP Verified Reference Architecture for 3PAR StoreServ Storage and vSphere 6.0

To assure data on HP ConvergedSystems is protected, HP has developed a set of practices and deployment guidance for the ConvergedSystem 700 and StoreOnce. For customers utilizing VMware and 3PAR StoreServ as part of a ConvergedSystem they can protect data 17x faster with application-integrated snapshot protection via StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central.

⁽¹⁾ IDC Integrated Systems: End-User Survey Report 2014, DOC #251695, Sep 2014