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A Practical Strategy for Converged Infrastructure Build a roadmap to the data center in your future that you can follow at your own pace Converged Infrastructure Specialist Converged Infrastructure All the technologies you use today— servers, storage, networks, applications and management—have evolved to the point where they can be converged into a single entity. If you’ve been keeping up with the trends in with a high-level mandate, you could provision a The converged IT over the last few years, you’ve gone from new system from available capacity on demand, infrastructure in your runaway server sprawl with racks of physical and de-provision it and use the capacity future is as much a servers in your data center operating at less somewhere else when the project is complete. mind set as it is a bill than 10 percent of their capacity to runaway of materials for new server sprawl with images of virtual servers It would be possible to provide end users with technology. propagating with reckless abandon in your a range of choices—within parameters set by virtualized pools of resources. your operating environment—to provision their own computing capacity for specifi c projects. According to industry watchers, most IT Your department could also accurately allocate departments are still spending more than 70 costs to departments for the capacity they use, percent of their time scrambling to keep their turning the IT department into a service provider existing IT environments from self-destructing. instead of a cost center. That doesn’t leave much time for doing the innovative things that support the business in A Realistic Process creative and rewarding ways. If you don’t have an unlimited budget, what you need is a realistic process that will enable If you think there must be a better solution, you to incrementally transform your current you’re right. And it may be closer than you think. heterogeneous, somewhat jerry-rigged IT environment into the well-mannered, converged The good news is that a truly converged infrastructure that you’ve read about on your infrastructure for your data center is now vendor’s website as time and your actual budget technologically feasible. In fact, if you had an allow. It can be done. unlimited budget, you could build the future of computing today right in your own data center. The converged infrastructure in your future is And it would work great, too. as much a mind set as it is a bill of materials for new technology. According to Brandon Harris, Instead of deploying individual resources Logicalis’ vice president of HP solutions, your piecemeal, you could deploy compute capacity “data center of the future” begins as soon as and provision applications as they are brought you decide to stop thinking in terms of discrete online. You’d realize the key benefi ts of cloud servers and storage for every application computing—rapid self-provisioning, automation and start thinking about shared interoperable and capacity-on-demand—in your own data resources across your entire IT infrastructure. center. The next time you have a rush project As Kevin Gruneisen, vice president of Logicalis’ Breaking from the tradition of dividing the IT data center practice, likes to say, the fi rst step environment into silos by product category—i.e., in fi guring out how to get to where you want to server, storage, networks and management— go is fi guring out where you are. Understanding the HP converged infrastructure framework your current environment will determine where establishes four sets of related functions. to begin in a way that suits your unique situation. They are: Once you know where you are and where you want to go, you can develop a strategy that gets 1. HP Matrix Operating Environment—A you there at a pace you can afford. common management platform to manage technologies from infrastructure to application. The ultimate destination, admittedly, can seem a little hazy. Although they might 2. HP Virtual Connect FlexFabric—A common, call it a converged infrastructure, dynamic wired-once, virtual I/O network. infrastructure, unifi ed computing or even utility computing, every computer company in the 3. HP Virtual Resource Pools—Virtualized market claims to have a vision of your “data computer, memory, storage and network center of the future.” resources. Breaking from Tradition 4. HP Data Center Smart Grid—An intelligent The devil, of course, is in the details. Today, energy management grid that encompasses all only HP, through a combination of acquisition systems and facilities. and innovation, has assembled an architectural framework and all of the building blocks to take Unlike the traditional silos in many data centers you from the conceptual level all the way down that are defi ned, and often jealously protected to the servers, storage, networks, desktops, thin behind their own acronyms and skill sets, the clients and management tools that you can use components of HP’s converged infrastructure to start implementing a converged infrastructure roadmap are defi ned by how they interact with in your data center right now. each other. Within HP’s converged infrastructure framework a rack-optimized or tower-based standalone there are several technologies that reach across server. the traditional silos that you can use as catalysts to accelerate the controlled, incremental HP recently introduced Integrity server blades, transformation of your data center environment. the industry’s fi rst line of 8-socket, Unix scale- up blades that have been optimized to run For example, HP introduced Virtual Connect in multiple operating systems, including: HP-UX 2006 to provide blade server edge connectivity 11i v3, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, HP that was wire-once and change ready. OpenVMS, and HP NonStop. Integrity server Two million ports later, Virtual Connect, in blades deliver all the benefi ts of the blade form combination with HP Networking technology, factor and are also capable of running mission- has become the foundation for HP’s FlexFabric critical applications. strategy. A key advantage of introducing blades to On a practical, if not personal level, what this your data center is that your investment in means is that if the server guy decides on Virtual blade chassis and racks is protected over Connect for his blade servers, he better be time because you can always add additional talking to the networking guy. Virtual Connect blades, unlike money spent on maintaining older converges up to four NICs over a 10 Gb server technology for which there is no roadmap to the connection. Bandwidth limits can also be future. dynamically confi gured on the fl y on each NIC, and the number of blade interconnect modules required can be reduced by as much as 75 Blade Everything percent. And, because it is based on open HP has more than servers in mind for the blade standards, it is possible to plug Virtual Connect transformation. And, HP is at the forefront of the into the network of your choice: HP Networking, “blade everything” approach to the data center Cisco, Brocade, etc. that makes it possible to physically integrate servers, storage, networking, applications and Wave of Change management in a single blade enclosure. Another catalyst that has initiated a wave of change through everything in the data center The best example of this concept is HP’s Matrix is blade technology. Blades are modular, need Operating Environment which is essentially fewer cables, require less fl oor space, use less the kernel of a converged infrastructure in a power, require less cooling and can be managed blade enclosure. Matrix works like a command by integrated management tools. These and center that uses your guidelines to automatically other dramatic effi ciencies enabled the blade provision and de-provision resources on the form factor to take the data center by storm. The fl y. If demands by one application require more fi rst commercial blade servers were shipped in storage, for example, it will provide it. If specifi c 2001, and the worldwide blade server market servers are hitting performance levels, it will is now projected to reach almost $16 billion by adjust the workload accordingly. 2013. Implementing the Matrix Operating Environment Blade servers like HP’s family of ProLiant is, frankly, not for everyone. Depending on servers built on the x86 platform became the the confi guration, it can approach $200,000 building blocks of the fi rst wave of virtualized for the hardware, software and services and consolidated data centers. Blade enclosure involved. Everyone, however, can use the deployments accommodate the ebb and fl ow Matrix Operating Environment as a model for of virtualized workloads. If more capacity is a converged infrastructure which they can needed, more blades can be added to the approximate in their own data center as budgets enclosure avoiding a complete replacement of and resources allow. The key to building your own converged 3PAR technology is recognized as leading the infrastructure command center is implementing category of highly virtualized, dynamically tiered, technologies in each area of your data center multi-tenant storage arrays built for public and that can communicate and interact with each private cloud computing. Industry analysts other. Matrix packages them together, but if say that 3PAR points the direction for the next you can’t afford the package, you can still move generation of HP storage. Shortly after the toward a functional operating environment acquisition, HP named 3PAR CEO David Scott by aligning technology building blocks that head of StorageWorks, HP’s storage portfolio. have the capacity to interact with each other according to the specifi c requirements of your IT The technologies in StorageWorks now include: environment.