SCALING THE NEEDS OF ENTERPRISE WITH HPE PROLIANT HOW THE HPE PROLIANT DL325 AND DL385 CAN POWER ENTERPRISE WORKLOADS SECURELY WHILE SIMPLIFYING MANAGEMENT THROUGH AUTOMATION TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION PAGE 2 ROME – THE BUILDING BLOCKS PAGE 4 GETTING THE HYBRID CLOUD RIGHT THROUGH INTELLIGENCE PAGE 6 WORKLOAD AFFINITY – WHERE THE HPE PROLIANT GEN 10 SHINES PAGE 7 CYBER RESILIENCE ACHIEVED THROUGH SECURITY PAGE 10 ADDENDUM – HPE PROLIANT GEN 10 PLUS PAGE 15 DRIVING IMPROVED WORKLOAD PERFORMANCE PAGE 16 Page 1 Scaling The Needs of Enterprise With HPE ProLiant December 2019 Copyright ©2019 Moor Insights & Strategy INTRODUCTION When Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) launched the HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen 10 and HPE ProLiant DL325 Gen 10 servers in 2017, based on the 1st Generation AMD EPYC processor, it marked the return of choice to the datacenter. IT organizations that sought to deliver performant platforms securely and lower total cost of ownership had a viable alternative that offered a unique set of capabilities. This choice also led to an increase in the pace of innovation in the server market stimulated by this new competition. The value proposition of the HPE ProLiant DL385 and HPE ProLiant DL325 boils down to workload optimized performance, intelligent automation to simplify management, and the industry’s most comprehensive security, all delivered as-a-Service. Performance optimization, security and automation are benefits that can be realized by any IT organization. However, these benefits carry greater significance for the IT organization living in a hybrid cloud world. With the release of the AMD EPYC 7002 Series processor (based on the new “Rome” architecture), the HPE ProLiant DL385 and HPE ProLiant DL325 servers are poised to deliver more. More performance and power efficiency. More security. More automation. And, more savings. How does the HPE ProLiant DL385 and HPE ProLiant DL325 further enable the IT organization operating and managing in a hybrid cloud environment? Where do these servers shine? What is the significance of the AMD EPYC 7002 Series architecture? The purpose of this paper is to explore answers to these questions. THE UNIQUE NEEDS OF THE DIGITALLY TRANSFORMED BUSINESS Today’s enterprise IT environment barely resembles environments from just a few short years ago: • New and emerging workloads and applications are being deployed across business units in a DevOps methodology designed to hasten time to value. • Data management platforms are no longer just relational database management systems (RDBMS) running on “big iron” servers. Structured and unstructured Page 2 Scaling The Needs of Enterprise With HPE ProLiant December 2019 Copyright ©2019 Moor Insights & Strategy data stores integrated with analytics tools power the digitally transformed business in its quest for first-mover status. • While virtualization rules the datacenter, cloud-native applications built as containerized services are becoming more mainstream. • Edge computing is gaining momentum as organizations capitalize on the data deluge being created by the internet of things (IoT). • Hybrid and multi-cloud environments are key elements to IT’s strategy to support the emerging needs of the business. • Software Defined Everything (SDx) requires a server platform that has both richness and balance of features to support any workload at any time in any location. Enterprise IT is tasked with managing and securing the modern datacenter that powers the digitally transformed business. The boundaries of the datacenter now extend to the edge, with IoT/IIoT devices generating unprecedented levels of data that must be turned into actionable intelligence in real-time - securely. This data then travels to datastores in the cloud(s) and the core datacenter, where deeper analysis is performed and where storage and archival takes place. IT ALL STARTS WITH THE SERVER It all starts with the server. This statement has been made many times, but, in today’s datacenter, these words have never been truer. Hybrid cloud introduces a level of complexity that the average IT organization can hardly afford to take on. Investing in intelligent server infrastructure with complementary toolsets from companies such as HPE can reduce the burden of deploying, provisioning, managing and securing throughout the lifecycle of server platforms. The server is the cornerstone of the datacenter. Choosing the right server platform can help an organization meet the requirements of today’s market – speed (time to value) and agility. The HPE ProLiant DL385 and HPE ProLiant DL325 deliver a richness of features without increasing power, and specifically regarding security, HPE ProLiant Servers were found to have “unmatched capability that is unique in the server hardware industry.” 1 1 Jason Shropshire, CTO, InfusionPoints, September 2017 Page 3 Scaling The Needs of Enterprise With HPE ProLiant December 2019 Copyright ©2019 Moor Insights & Strategy ROME – THE BUILDING BLOCKS Just as the server is the cornerstone of the datacenter, the CPU is the cornerstone of server technology. The cornerstone to the HPE ProLiant DL385 and HPE ProLiant DL325 is the AMD EPYC 7002 Series processor (codenamed Rome), built on the Zen2 microarchitecture, and there’s a lot of “new” for this generation of processor. The EPYC 7002 Series differentiation begins with its design. The EPYC processor incorporates a design approach known as chiplets. An AMD EPYC chiplet consists of 8 compute modules (each containing 8 cores) residing in an I/O die that connects all modules via high speed interconnect, called Infinity Fabric. AMD claims this chiplet design enables it to deliver higher performing CPUs at a lower cost, which should result in lower overall system costs from OEMs such as HPE. FIGURE 1: ROME SYSTEM DIAGRAM Source: Moor Insights AMD produces the EPYC 7002 Series using a 7nm manufacturing process (7nm referencing the size of the transistor gates that make up the CPU). This is important to both performance and power. A reduction in transistor size means that companies can pack more computational power into a given space, utilizing less power. This, in turn, means server platforms such as the HPE ProLiant DL385 and HPE ProLiant DL325 deliver improved performance-per-watt-per-dollar, an important metric when measuring relevant server performance. Page 4 Scaling The Needs of Enterprise With HPE ProLiant December 2019 Copyright ©2019 Moor Insights & Strategy As with the first generation EPYC processor, the 7002 Series processor technical specifications lead the industry. The increased L3 cache size (256MB) of EPYC, combined with per core integer performance improvements, make this CPU even more compelling than its predecessor. Furthermore, the doubling of the floating-point performance and other microarchitecture improvements should expand the CPU’s relevance in the high-performance computing (HPC) market. FIGURE 2: ROME SPECIFICATIONS Source: Moor Insights The EPYC 7002 Series processor also leads in security. AMD's emphasis on silicon- rooted security began with the release of its original EPYC processor. Its stance has been validated as EPYC processors were immune to the side channel exploits experienced by its competitor. The AMD Secure Processor is the heart of EPYC’s security solution. During the boot process, the AMD Secure Processor validates the server BIOS. In addition to validating a pristine boot environment, the AMD Secure Processor performs other functions detailed below: Page 5 Scaling The Needs of Enterprise With HPE ProLiant December 2019 Copyright ©2019 Moor Insights & Strategy • Secure Memory Encryption (SME). AMD’s secure processor physically encrypts DIMMs (dual in-line memory modules), protecting against memory scraping and bad actors freezing and physically removing DIMMs from a server. • Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV 2.0). This technology encrypts and isolates virtual machines (VMs) from one another – and even from the hypervisor. This ensures absolute best protection from malware proliferation in an enterprise or cloud environment. Consider the use case where malware exploits a line of business application. In a traditional environment, that malware can spread from VM to VM. With AMD SEV, the exploit is isolated and prevented from doing further damage. One of the key upgrades in SEV 2.0 is the number of encryption keys that can be issued. In the previous generation of EPYC, SEV 1.0 supported up to 19 keys, which enabled 19 encrypted VMs per processor. In the second generation of EPYC, SEV 2.0 supports up to 509 keys. This should support the needs of the most demanding enterprise deployments. GETTING THE HYBRID CLOUD RIGHT THROUGH INTELLIGENCE The modern datacenter has no physical boundaries. We live in a hyper-connected world where everyone and everything generates and shares data, and that data can provide invaluable insights. Whether on- or off-premises; bare-metal, virtualization or containers; in a public or private cloud, the modern datacenter must comprehend the full gamut of hybrid cloud possibilities. This new hyper-connected world stretches IT like never before. IT organizations must transform the way they consume, deploy and manage infrastructure to securely enable the business that is competing in an ever-changing market. In the past, deploying, operating and managing infrastructure was a trial and error process. In today’s world, the pressure to “get it right” the first time is immense. IT Nirvana is infrastructure that can be deployed, optimized and managed