HP have recently released a bundle of their technologies (server, storage, networking and management under a “converged infrastructure” umbrella.
HP's intention to make its converged infrastructure the centerpiece of its enterprise push was emphasized on January 13, when HP CEO Mark Hurd and Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer held a joint press conference. The three-year deal announced by the two companies, around what they call an "infrastructure-to-applications model" translates as, we're going to drive customers to Microsoft software and HP enterprise infrastructure.
One of the key areas under this umbrella is power and cooling, not typically the most exciting conversations but when you have the HP spin on it suddenly they become talking points.
Power and Cooling are two key areas that are targeted by virtualisation assessments, desktop virtualisation assessments, consolidation exercise and features heavy on any IT Efficiency strategy and there are some heavy stats to substantiate this interest.
According to perhaps the most authoritative estimate around, by Jonathan Koomey of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, working off of IDC-compiled numbers, server electricity use doubled between 2000 and 2005. (Those are the most recent figures.) On the bright side, there's some evidence that the shift to cloud computing is pushing overall consumption down.
This is where HP BladeSystem comes in, and has the the ability to throttle pretty much every resource. It can throttle CPUs, voltage-regulator modules, memory, fans, power supplies, all the way down to trying to keep the power consumed as low as possible at any given time. It's not just power supplies. HP have variable-speed fans. Plus, the fans are set up in a zone, so if one part of the chassis is running hot, those fans will run faster, and on another part of the chassis, the fans will run slower.
Interestingly enough CPU draws less power than memory, and the advent of multi core servers coupled with virtualisation is starting to see larger memory configurations in standard server chassis’.
Off-the-shelf servers are ready to rise to the memory challenge. For example, HP's ProLiant BL-490c server can support up to 18 DIMMs and 288 GB of RAM in a half-height blade form-factor. Sixteen of these blades can fit into a single enclosure.
Converged Infrastructure
The architecture merges not only servers, storage, and networking, but in HP's taxonomy it also includes power and cooling, and management software.
HP BladeSystem Matrix is their first step into the converged infrastructure vision HP Virtual Connect is the second key component of the overall architecture. Virtual Connect is a key piece of the architecture, negotiating the connection between the servers and networking. It's intended to make the server component appear as one system to the external LAN and SAN.
We are excited by this shift from HP and think there are compelling reasons to consider this in your 3 to 5 year strategy from a single vendor, with multi touch products with a clear vision and focus. Want more information please feel free to contact us.