Over the past year, we have heard of HP’s Converged Infrastructure vision.

Today, HP has opened the kimono just a little bit wider, and laid some cards on the table for all to see.

What is HP Converged Infrastructure?
HP Converged Infrastructure calls for the end-to-end virtualization of resources in the data center and unification under common management. With HP Virtual Resource Pools, modular standards-based technology assets can be quickly assigned or repurposed to support any workload or application need from enterprise, to cloud and high performance computing applications.

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 optimized across the infrastructure, allowing companies to improve utilization, lower energy use and reduce costs.

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

The new HP Infrastructure Operating Environment reduces complexity by taking application-specific processes and tools and transforming them into a standardized, 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 Optimization solutions.

HP FlexFabric integrates thousands of servers and storage resources into a single virtualized, high-performance and low-latency network fabric. It is a “wire once” network fabric connecting compute, network and storage resources on demand. This enables businesses to thrive in an increasingly unpredictable economy by providing data center environments with elasticity – the ability to stretch and snap back to meet rapidly changing needs.

A technology layer of the new HP Converged Infrastructure architecture, FlexFabric merges the technology, management tools and partner ecosystems of HP ProCurve and HP Virtual Connect (VC) solutions. This shifts network intelligence from the core closer to the server edge to improve performance, utilization and flexibility. For the first time, network connections and capacity can be fully virtualized from the edge to the core to deliver “network as a service,” allowing resources to be accessed “on the fly.”

HP FlexFabric enables customers to:

• Achieve break through cost structures
• Improve business agility and gain faster time to service
• Ensure investment protection for existing data center networks
• Wire-once, dynamic assembly ­– always predictable

As organizations expand their virtual architectures, tighter orchestration between network administrators and server administrators is necessary to better manage connectivity and reduce costs.

HP FlexFabric technology delivers that integration while consolidating multiple protocols into a single network fabric to dramatically lower network complexity and costs. This wire-once approach converges Ethernet data and storage networks onto one fabric. As a result, customers can easily adapt connections and performance to meet changes in workload demands.

Key benefits to customers are:

• Lowered costs by consolidating server connectivity and reducing the size of the network infrastructure, including the number of switches.
• Elimination of costly and time consuming change management processes, while reducing the number of error-prone or conflicting configuration steps.
• Coordination of connection design and management into a single system with flexible automation and orchestration capabilities. This allows connections to be instantly migrated as applications move across different resources or between data centers.
• Improved, predictable performance and quality of service by dynamically scaling capacity to match application demands “on the fly.” Customers can provision storage area network (SAN) and local area network (LAN) resources in advance and enable them as needed.

Industry standards for multivendor support

HP FlexFabric is based on industry standards and offers a modular design to support multivendor solutions. Customers can leverage their current environments with new HP solutions and processes for building a converged infrastructure, including network management and application deployment.

HP Virtual Resource Pools virtualize 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 maximize resources, while increasing scalability, flexibility and utilization of technology assets across their infrastructures.

In a conference call yesterday with Lee Johns of HP, he explained some of the innovations Virtual Pools bring to the enterprise.

According to Lee, Virtual Resource Pools will:

• Improve storage resources
• Help customers break down the silos in the datacenter
• Dynamically allocate resources
• Scale up and down, or scale out
• Are self-optimizing and intelligent
• Are about the most open
• Use industry standards
• Are perfectly placed for explosive file growth.

HP has created three devices that enable Virtual Resource Pool:

• HP StorageWorks X9000 Network Storage System family – Allows customers to efficiently manage large amounts of information and quickly respond to new business opportunities. Leveraging technology from the acquisition of IBRIX, the HP X9000 systems enables customers with data-intensive operations to virtualize stored files and create a single pool that is instantly accessible. Starting as low as $1.50/gigabyte, the system offers an industry-leading 16-petabyte single namespace, or virtual file system capacity.
• HP StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform (SVSP) v3.0 ­– Enables administrators to meet growing data requirements by doubling the capacity, scalability and performance over previous versions. Customers also can simplify management and increase efficiency with enhancements to the new Command View SVSP management interface. This new product also reduces setup time by up to 80 percent through the back-end logical unit number (LUN) provisioning service.⁽¹⁾ This feature automatically creates SVSP storage pools from capacity provisioned across multiple HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Arrays (EVAs). Customers also can improve capacity utilization by up to 300 percent through the SVSP’s ability to configure virtualized pools of storage and thin provisioning capacity.⁽²⁾
• HP StorageWorks Cluster Extension EVA software integrated with Microsoft® Hyper-V Live Migration – Support for Microsoft Hyper-V Live Migration enables customers, for the first time, to easily protect data in virtual server and storage environments. This software integration allows customers to dynamically move both applications and storage across the data center to meet changing business demands while providing efficient disaster recovery.

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 visualize, 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.

Please remember that these announcements so far, are about only in storage. With more to come, it behooves IT managers to start boning up on their knowledge of HP Converged Infrastructure.

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