HP Unveiled Its Own Converged Infrastructure Architecture

HP unveiled the HP Converged Infrastructure Architecture and associated services and partner offerings that provide a blueprint for chief information officers to create elasticity in their technology environments, supporting innovation in their businesses.

Today, only 34 percent of typical IT budgets are dedicated to business innovation. This is because the proliferation of IT sprawl has created technology silos in data centers that consume up to 66 percent of the technology budget for maintenance and operations. Solving the issue of IT sprawl is expected to create a ZAR 2,74 billion market opportunity for converged infrastructure solutions by 2012.

The HP Converged Infrastructure enables data center environments that allow organisations to focus on innovation and making technology a key differentiator for their businesses. It integrates existing silos of compute, storage, network and facility resources with unified management to deliver a virtualised, highly automated technology environment. With pools of shared services that can be leveraged on the fly, businesses increase the flexibility of their environments and speed time to application value.

In a related advance, HP has extended the HP BladeSystem Solution Builder program to enable additional independent software vendors to build solutions that customers can quickly deploy and easily manage in a converged infrastructure.

“Companies are asking HP to help them thrive in unpredictability by using technology to rapidly meets the needs of their business,” said Manoj Bhoola, Country Manager, Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking, HP Enterprise Business, HP South Africa. “HP Converged Infrastructure is the answer and only HP, with its market-leading technology, intellectual property, expertise and partner ecosystem, can deliver it today.”

The HP Converged Infrastructure eliminates technology silos and complexity in the data center while leveraging current technology investments. Through unified management, all assets become part of a resource pool that can be divided, assembled and changed to dynamically align to any business, workload or application need. The use of these resources is optimised across the infrastructure, allowing companies to improve utilisation, lower energy use and reduce costs.

The new HP Converged Infrastructure Architecture
delivers a number of technology innovations providing:

• Increased business agility through on-the-fly delivery of shared services: The new HP Infrastructure Operating Environment reduces complexity by taking application-specific processes and tools and transforming them into a standardised, shared environment. Governance through policy-based management and automated, template-driven application deployment significantly speeds time to business value. Complementary products include the enhanced HP Insight Dynamics, HP Insight Control and HP Business Technology Optimisation solutions.
• Dramatically lower costs and complexity with a wire-once network fabric: HP FlexFabric integrates thousands of servers and storage resources into a single virtualised, high-performance and low-latency network fabric. Built on industry standards, FlexFabric is highly scalable and can consolidate multiple protocols. For the first time, network connections and capacity can be fully virtualised from the edge to the core.
• Optimised resource utilisation for any application or workload: HP Virtual Resource Pools virtualise shared server, storage and networking resources to provide an easy to manage, cost-effective, shared-service environment. As a result, administrators can easily call upon any technology service in the pool in real time to support changing business requirements. HP Virtual Resource Pools enable customers to maximise resources, while increasing scalability, flexibility and utilisation of technology assets across their infrastructures.
• Improved energy efficiency and management across the data center: HP Data Center Smart Grid delivers an intelligent, energy-aware environment across technology infrastructures and data center facilities. For the first time, businesses can accurately visualise, monitor and control energy use in real time. With HP Data Center Smart Grid, companies can set policies for energy use based on accurate data and monitor their ongoing performance to ensure compliance with internal, environmental or government regulations and goals.

Embodying all of the attributes of the HP Converged Infrastructure Architecture, the HP BladeSystem Matrix has allowed Dubai Airport, UAE,  Non-HP site, one of world’s fastest growing airports, to turn technology from a cost center to a profit generator.

“To keep pace with rapid growth, we needed to consolidate IT resources from eight datacenters to four and turn IT into a profit generator,” said Ghanim Al Falasi, vice president, IT, Dubai Airport, UAE. “By adopting a converged infrastructure with HP BladeSystem Matrix and working with HP services, we achieved our goals, and created a green, highly responsive data center environment at a significantly lower cost of operations, while eliminating the complexities caused by IT sprawl.”

Partners adopt HP Converged Infrastructure Architecture
The HP Converged Infrastructure Architecture consists of open, industry-standard solutions that allow integration and deployment with offerings from a broad partner community. Channel partners also are able to capitalise on new demand-generation programs and sales tools to further extend their business in this space.

HP also unveiled worldwide services that enable customers to use existing technology investments in the planning, design and deployment of an HP Converged Infrastructure. HP Converged Infrastructure Consulting services include IT maturity model workshops, assessments and proof-of-concept demos for Converged Infrastructure solutions such as the HP BladeSystem Matrix.

Finally, customers can eliminate the capital and speed time to value of an HP Converged Infrastructure through IT outsourcing with HP Enterprise Services.