Business white paper

Embrace convergenceHP Converged Infrastructure solutions

Business white paper | HP Converged Infrastructure solutions

Table of contents

3 Increased pressure to deliver instant results

4 Status quo IT is no longer your option

5 Convergence is the solution

6 Converged Infrastructure creates a strong foundation moving forward

7 New HP Converged Infrastructure solutions

7 HP ConvergedSystem

8 Speed and simplicity

8 HP Converged Management

9 The growing IT management gap

9 Gain a clear view of your world

9 Smarter searches

10 HP Converged Infrastructure Services

10 Why HP?

11 Getting started

3

Increased pressure to deliver instant results

Every ten to fifteen years, a tectonic shift erupts to re-shape IT. Moving from mainframes to client/server and to Internet computing altered the way you purchase, build, consume, and deliver your technology. Now, once again, the landscape is shifting as we see the rise of mobility, social networking, Big Data, and cloud computing. Two-thirds of the workforce will soon own smartphones, and 40% will be mobile1 thus adding to the management complexity with the BYOD (bring your own device) phenomenon. Big Data raises questions as to how IT will be able to manage structured and unstructured data sets too large to process using traditional data processing applications. Add to this picture an unpredictable global economy, scaled-back IT resources, aging infrastructures, and a growing pressure to deliver results instantly, and it’s easy to see IT is at a critical juncture.

1 “The Nexus of Forces Changes Everything: Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2012 Keynote,” ID: G00246019, Gartner, January 2013.

Figure 1. Major shifts in technology

Mainframe Client/server Internet Mobile social, Big Data, and cloud

Every 10 to 15 years, a tectonic shift comes along in our industrydisturbing the status quo, fundamentally changing how technologically is consumed, purchased, and delivered.

• Is a new style of business, powered by IT

• Is being driven by trends in cloud, security, Big Data, social networking, and mobility

• Spans devices, infrastructure, software, and services

• Promises more benefits, such as: lower cost, greater agility, simplicity, and speed

The New Style of IT:

Business white paper | HP Converged Infrastructure solutions

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Many IT professionals are coming to the realization that their legacy architectures just can’t accommodate new business demands such as the support of new cloud delivery models or the taming the explosion in human information. Eager to transform their data center operations, organizations have launched virtualization and cloud projects. These initiatives have delivered many of the promised benefits such as improved service delivery and application workload handling. However, there have also been a few downsides such as increased management complexity and in many cases, higher operational costs. Virtualizing servers using various hypervisors, for example, has been shown to increase management overhead and create virtual sprawl.

Status quo IT is no longer your optionA legacy IT architecture perpetuates silos and complexity through an overload of products and tools that lack interoperability. A business and its applications and services can’t run in silos, and neither can IT. A rigid infrastructure makes it hard to innovate in the ways a business requires. The traffic flow from the data center to the user in the campus or branch can be impeded and require dozens of disaggregated manual management applications that introduce delay and errors. The undesired result is often business-crippling network downtime.

Figure 2. Silos prevent growth of the business

Businesses don’t run in silos

Applications don’t run in silos

Why should IT?

Complexity

Cost

Finger-pointing

Slow response

Silos are the cause of data center pain

Business white paper | HP Converged Infrastructure solutions

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In addition, a monolithic infrastructure fosters an unfortunate spending imbalance where IT organizations spend 70% or more of their resources on operations, fire drills, and activities that just keep the lights on. Unfortunately, that doesn’t leave much budget and resources for innovation and delivering essential services needed to fuel sustainable growth and meet new revenue and profit goals. IT is strained and ready to snap. You have accelerating business demands and a changing landscape on one end and on the other, the internal constraints such as complexity, capacity, and cost. With IT at a real breaking point, status quo is no longer your option.

Convergence is the solution

The most widely accepted approach for solving these legacy data center constraints is IT convergence. In simple terms, infrastructure convergence optimally brings together server, storage, networking, facilities, and management in order to achieve interoperability that utilizes common resource pools based on a common platform.

But in order to fully obtain the benefits of convergence such as greater efficiency, innovation, agility, lower costs, and reduced complexity, you need more than just the integration of existing silos. If you step back and look beyond the technology, it’s necessary to ask, “What do I really need to achieve and what do I want from a converged infrastructure?” Most IT professionals would say they need their vendor-partners to provide an infrastructure that’s easier, faster, and a seamless experience from end-to-end. And that they want to preserve their current investments, and avoid a rip-and-replace option.

You want a solution where everything just works together and it’s elegant, application-centric, and instant. You plug it in, and it all works. Deployment, provisioning, updates, migrating workloads, rolling out critical business applications, you want these in a few simple clicks. In this paper, we’ll discuss what the next wave of convergence will look like, and what it will mean for your business and IT strategies. We’ll look at how HP’s converged infrastructure solutions are raising the bar yet again to help modernize the data center.

2 “Converged Systems: State of the Market and Future Outlook,” IDC Special Report Series—Converged Systems: End-User Survey Report, September 2012.

3 “Is the Concept of Server Obsolete or in Need of Re-Defining?” by George Weiss, Gartner Group, March 2012.

4 “Converged Infrastructure: Attitudes and Acceptance,” a commission study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of HP and Intel, December 2011.

IDC states, convergence is THE next IT cycle and it will drive IT purchasing decisions for the next decade.2

Gartner says, “By 2015, 1/3 of all servers shipped will ship in a converged infrastructure.”3

A Forrester study predicted that 28% planned on implementing converged infrastructure in next twelve months, and another 28% in a year or more.4

Leading industry analysts have cited infrastructure convergence as the key to shaping the future of IT:

Business white paper | HP Converged Infrastructure solutions

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Figure 3. HP’s Next Generation Convergence Solution

Driving towards an elegant seamless customer experience

Built on new HP ConvergedSystem building blocks: For Any Workload, at Any Scale:

Smart cache Fabric

ServicesMgmt controller

VirtualizationCloudBig Data

HP Next Gen Convergence Platform:

Software-defined IntelligentFrictionless

Converged Infrastructure creates a strong foundation moving forward

Backed by years of focused engineering, R&D investments, and decades of data center experience, HP Converged Infrastructure solutions are making data centers simpler, more flexible, more efficient, and less expensive to operate. Convergence has helped businesses accelerate time to application and business value and increase their investment in innovation. A converged infrastructure not only brings together server, storage, and networking resources into resource pools, but it unifies management tools, policies, and processes so resources and applications can be managed in a holistic, integrated fashion. Security is built in, tightly integrated to offer better protection from sophisticated security threats at the perimeter and within the interior of the business. And convergence brings together power and cooling management capabilities, so systems and facilities work flawlessly together.

As an HP customer, you benefit from the collaborative impact of our large global ecosystem of over 4,500 global HP AllianceOne members and partners who make our convergence solutions portfolio one of the most comprehensive in the world. Private industry and public sector customers are using HP solutions as their foundation for today and for the New Style of IT. It is their blueprint for a modern architecture that’s integrated by design from the ground up.

Business white paper | HP Converged Infrastructure solutions

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New HP Converged Infrastructure solutions

The robust HP convergence portfolio serves to help you handle the challenges you face today, as well as those you are likely to encounter in the future. The three components of the HP next-generation convergence platform are the HP ConvergedSystem, Converged Management, and Converged Infrastructure Services. They work together to deliver an elegant, end-to-end experience.

HP ConvergedSystem The HP ConvergedSystem portfolio forms the building blocks for the New Style of IT. These purpose-built systems deliver optimized solutions out of the box, uniting leading HP Converged Infrastructure with decades of experience in solution design for major applications.

To simplify your IT and make it more efficient, these integrated systems are built by design for critical workloads with virtualization, cloud, and Big Data. They bring together all the servers, storage, networking, and management and software you need in a system that’s easy to buy, manage and, support, and manage so you get value from your IT investments quickly.

The HP ConvergedSystem features market-leading, performance-enhanced solutions that are backed by our in-depth experience in solution design.

With HP ConvergedSystem, you don’t get disparate technologies bolted together and labeled as “converged.” Instead, you receive components designed from the start to ensure convergence and workload optimization. The result is a single, holistic computing ecosystem. For example, the ConvergedSystem for Virtualization delivers up to 2X the performance at 25% entry price than alternatives.5

With the HP ConvergedSystem products, you benefit from:

• Enterprise-grade reliability, based on rigorous configuration and firmware testing

• Enhanced customer experience by deploying systems designed as one, purchased as one, and managed as one

• Instant scalability to grow as your needs change; you can easily snap in new capacity with expansion models, or you can choose the HP Flexible Capacity Service to enable your system to scale up and down as needed

• Ability to integrate your new HP ConvergedSystem into your existing environment with no rip and replace

Business white paper | HP Converged Infrastructure solutions

5 “Based on HP internal testing of raw IOPs. HP ConvergedSystem 300 Standard delivers 6480 IOPs based vs. 2520 IOPs for the Vblock 100DX-3P. vce.com/asset/documents/vblock-100-architecture-overview.pdf. Cost estimated based on estimated list prices for the entry point for each, 2013.”

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Speed and simplicityQuick deployment, intuitive management, and system-level support are just a few reasons why your IT staff can spend less time on operations, and more time focused on building effective and innovative business services. The total system experience helps achieve these benefits:

• Ability to go from order to operations in as few as 20 days.

• Intuitive management at the system level instead of the component level. HP allows you to manage, monitor, verify, and patch converged systems—storage, networking, and compute—as one. HP ConvergedSystem also provides deep integration with third-party management solutions, including VMware vCenter.

• Fast problem resolution with system-level support. HP serves as your single point of accountability for hardware, operating system, and third-party software. This provides you with proactive problem prevention, up to 66% less unplanned downtime,6 pre-tested system-level patching, and automated 24x7 monitoring.

HP Converged Management HP Converged Management is the new central nervous system for the data center. It delivers integrated infrastructure lifecycle management capabilities and, through HP OneView, enables you to see and understand the capacity and health status of every device in your data center, in one screen. It provides role-specific views to your different IT stakeholders.

HP OneView is the first software platform that creates a modern and integrated workspace for lifecycle management of HP Converged Infrastructure. HP has applied the best experiences from the consumer world to the complex job of infrastructure management, so your IT team can work in a more natural and collaborative way.

Figure 4. HP OneView Map View: Visualize the relationships and dependencies of devices to troubleshoot and fix issues with pinpoint accuracy

6 “The Business Value of the HP Proactive Insight Experience,” IDC white paper sponsored by HP and Intel, March 2013.

Business white paper | HP Converged Infrastructure solutions

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The growing IT management gapHP OneView helps your organization close the IT management gap by shifting the focus of infrastructure management from “how devices run” to “how people work.” HP OneView delivers unprecedented ease of use, so you can deploy and manage your infrastructure faster, at a lower cost, and at a greater scale.

Gain a clear view of your worldWhat does your world look like through the HP OneView window? The dashboard feature in HP OneView provides one-click monitoring of the status of every device in your data center, all on one screen. No matter the size of your data center, you can monitor the essential status of every device in your environment and, from there, explore even deeper as needed. And you can forget about the information overload that’s common in many existing management tools—the HP OneView dashboard helps you know more and see just what you need to see.

Smarter searchesYou don’t search the Web with tree-and-branch navigation, so why should you use that for your infrastructure? This earlier-generation approach to navigation doesn’t scale, so it can’t be relied upon to help you quickly pinpoint a particular issue within a data center with thousands of devices. In a demo environment, the tree-and-branch view might be useful, but that’s because you’re managing a small quantity of servers, networking, and storage. In an enterprise data center, the tree-and-branch approach quickly shows its limitations with slow performance and its obtrusiveness at scale.

The Smart Search feature in HP OneView finds exactly what you’re looking for and quickly brings it to your fingertips. As your primary navigation tool, and a key feature of HP OneView, HP Smart Search allows you to find that elusive IT needle in the data center haystack.

Figure 5. HP OneView Smart Search: With HP OneView search, you’re milliseconds away from finding your IT needle in the data center haystack

“ With the introduction of HP OneView, HP has taken infrastructure management to a whole new level.” –Tadataka Okubo, Managing executive officer, ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation

“ With HP OneView, HP re-thought and re-defined how environments should be managed.” –Phillip Cockrell, Senior director, hardware partner alliances, SUSE

Business white paper | HP Converged Infrastructure solutions

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HP Converged Infrastructure Services

HP Converged Infrastructure Services include lifecycle services around consulting, support, outsourcing, training and certification, financing, and asset management. We provide the strategy, design, implementation, integration, HP ConvergedSystem deployment, and/or education you need to meet your unique business requirements. Our services help keep your key IT project initiatives—such as cloud, virtualization, Big Data, platform migrations, security or converged management—on track, and on time.

HP converged infrastructure experts offer you a simplified, proactive, and personalized customer experience that ensures a smooth transition from traditional, siloed, product-focused IT infrastructure to converged infrastructure. We also help address your organizational and process gaps.

At HP, it’s about real partnership. Visit hp.com/go/meettheexperts to learn more about our converged infrastructure experts.

Why HP?

HP is the only partner that can bring market-leading solutions across each of your key data center domains—servers, storage, networking, and management. We bring convergence DNA to each solution in order to deliver the optimal customer experience across the entire lifecycle.

And unlike others that are rigid and lock you in, HP is committed to providing open solutions that protect your investments in heterogeneous environments. The creation of a complete ecosystem around convergence ensures that you receive value from leading software vendors and other hardware partners. HP delivers the best of both worlds—the optimal balance between a fully integrated stack that maximizes performance and a more heterogeneous solution that maximizes your current infrastructure and investment.

Business white paper | HP Converged Infrastructure solutions

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Getting started

Say goodbye to status quo IT, and embrace the New Style of IT. HP Converged Infrastructure solutions help you overcome the inflexibility and high costs created by IT sprawl, while making sure you’re able to shift more resources to innovation and strategic initiatives. HP Converged Infrastructure solutions have been designed to make your data center simpler, flexible, efficient, and less expensive to operate. Only then is your IT infrastructure positioned to deliver any workload, anywhere, anytime to accelerate time to application and business value.

Whether you’re just getting started in the convergence conversation, or you’re well underway with creating a converged infrastructure, we offer everything from consulting, strategy, deployment, outsourcing, and facilities design to financial services, and the most comprehensive services portfolio to help you embrace the power of convergence. To learn more about HP convergence solutions, we also offer these valuable workshops:

HP Data Center Transformation Experience workshopLearn how to achieve stakeholder buy-in and build a transformation roadmap. Consolidate, standardize and automate—change the economics of IT through a step-by-step plan. hp.com/services/DCTworkshop

HP Converged Infrastructure workshopThis technical workshop covers all the fundamental converged infrastructure and cloud computing topics including people, processes and technology. Often combined with an HP ConvergedSystem demo, the workshop provides common understanding of several key topics and best practices in planning and mobilizing your IT teams. hp.com/services/ciworkshop

Learn more at hp.com/CI

Business white paper | HP Converged Infrastructure solutions

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Business white paper | HP Converged Infrastructure solutions