HP Converged Infrastructure for Dummies, 2nd edtion

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2nd Edition


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Table of ContentsIntroduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1

About This Book ........................................................................ 1About Infrastructure Convergence .......................................... 2Icons Used in This Book ............................................................ 2

Chapter 1: The Era of Convergence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3The Evolution of the Data Center in the Changing World .... 3Examining the Fundamental Flaw ............................................ 5Embracing the Infrastructure Convergence Trend ............... 7

Chapter 2: Infrastructure Convergence Basics . . . . . . . .9Infrastructure Convergence Basics ....................................... 10Simplifying for a New Style of IT ............................................ 10It’s a Journey ............................................................................ 12Business Value of a Converged Infrastructure ..................... 15Infrastructure Convergence and Cloud Computing ............ 17

Chapter 3: What to Look for When Choosing a Converged Infrastructure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19

Design Principles ..................................................................... 20Foundational Architectural Principles ................................. 21Infrastructure Convergence for Medium-Sized Enterprises ...23What to Look For in Your Technology Provider .................. 23

Chapter 4: How Convergence Affects You . . . . . . . . . . .27Changing Organizational Roles for CEOs and CFOs ............ 27Changing Organizational Roles for CIOs and CTOs ............. 28Changing Organizational Roles for System

Architects and Planning ...................................................... 29Changing Organizational Roles for IT Directors .................. 30Changing Organizational Roles for Functional IT areas ..... 31

Chapter 5: Examining HP Converged Infrastructure Solutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .33

One Size Doesn’t Fit All ........................................................... 34Converged Data Centers ......................................................... 36HP ConvergedSystems ............................................................ 37Converged Technologies ........................................................ 40


HP Converged Infrastructure For Dummies, 2nd Edition ivBringing Convergence Value to Life ...................................... 44Solutions for Micro and Small Business ................................ 46

Chapter 6: How HP Can Help . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .47HP Converged Infrastructure Capability Model ................... 47Converged Infrastructure Transformation

Experience Workshop ......................................................... 50HP Connectivity Transformation

Experience Workshop ......................................................... 51Kick-Start Your Cloud Journey with HP

Cloud Professional Services ............................................... 51HP Consulting and Support Services for

Converged Infrastructure ................................................... 52

Chapter 7: Nine Reasons You Should Embrace the Era of Convergence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .57

Standing Still Is a Mistake ....................................................... 57Simplicity Accelerates IT Value.............................................. 58Make the Move to a Modern Data Center ............................. 58Turn Big Data into Big Profits, Big Savings, and Big Insight ...58Meet SLAs and Minimize Downtime ...................................... 59Be Flexible, Secure, and Competitive .................................... 59Redirect Wasted Energy .......................................................... 59Be Ready for What’s Next ....................................................... 59Turn Technology into an Advantage ..................................... 60

Chapter 8: Five Ways to Converge with Ease . . . . . . . . .61To Go Fast, First Go Slow ........................................................ 61Leverage Where You Can ........................................................ 61Don’t Forget Other Options .................................................... 62Be Informed .............................................................................. 62Look Deeper .............................................................................. 62

Appendix A: HP Customer Case Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . .63Priceline.com ............................................................................ 63Fortescue Metals Group .......................................................... 64Commerz Direktservice GmbH ............................................... 64CenterBeam .............................................................................. 65Hostworks ................................................................................. 66

Appendix B: HP Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .67Resources on Converged Infrastructure ............................... 67Other Important Resources .................................................... 67


Introduction

A re you ready to accelerate the value of IT in your busi-ness? Would you like to simplify across your IT infra-

structure so you can increase speed and agility, and focus on innovating for the future rather than being mired in the past? If so, you’ve come to the right place because analysts agree it’s the next big thing in IT. In fact, it’s already here and widely accepted by many enterprises.

Everyone in the IT arena understands that the speed and scale of business have been pushing traditional IT to the breaking point. CEOs face pressure to meet the new wave of customer, partner, and employee expectations that arise from mobility, social media, and big data. These constituencies are smart, savvy, and connected. No one has patience for businesses that can’t respond instantly to their needs.

To compete in this new age, organizations need a new style of IT infrastructure (data center, enterprise campus, and branch offices) that enables agile and rapid service delivery for any workload at any scale. IT organizations need to drive down costs plus deliver applications and services that are fast, scal-able, interoperable, and always available. Meeting all these needs is a tough proposition when you consider the new wave of evolving business models and the changing workforce.

Data center modernization and transformation simply has to happen faster. Current data centers are simply unsustainable.

About This BookThe cost, speed, and efficiency advantages of infrastructure convergence are phenomenal. But convergence confronts you with seemingly endless technology choices and confusing messages. All this makes it difficult to understand how best to get started and with which vendor — and which convergence solution is best aligned to your various workloads. This book makes it easier for you to understand convergence and the ways you can move forward quickly, safely, and successfully.


HP Converged Infrastructure For Dummies, 2nd Edition 2HP Converged Infrastructure For Dummies, 2nd Edition, provides an introduction to the fine points of infrastructure convergence: the trends, methodologies, and value it can deliver to you, plus a look at how the roles in IT are affected. In addition, the latter part of this book discusses the different solutions delivered by HP Converged Infrastructure and the various ways HP can help you get started to take advantage of infrastructure convergence — and do so at your own pace and preference.

This book was written with HP.

About Infrastructure ConvergenceBefore you dive into the book, we want to offer a simplified definition of the book’s main topic: Infrastructure convergence is all about simplifying and aligning IT to the speed of busi-ness for any workload at any scale. Simplicity is the cata-lyst for all things required of today’s new style of data center. Simplicity drives IT speed and agility so that time-to-application and service value can be accelerated, and changes can be made on the fly when needed. Simplicity drives greater assurance that uptime targets are met without exception and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) can be maintained. Simplicity drives broad efficiencies at all levels: lower cost, less risk, and more resources available for innovating.

Icons Used in This BookThis book uses the following icons to call your attention to information you might find helpful in particular ways. This way, you can easily spot the information when you refer to the book later.

The information in paragraphs marked by the Remember icon is important.

The Tip icon indicates extra-helpful information.

This information delves a bit deeper into technical aspects.


Chapter 1

The Era of ConvergenceIn This Chapter▶ Looking at the evolution of the data center and IT infrastructure▶ Investigating the fundamental flaw▶ Embracing the infrastructure convergence trend

C onvergence is inevitable — in fact, it’s already here. It is estimated that by the end of 2014, a third of the IT

market will consist of fully integrated systems, although the more traditional route of purchasing server, storage, and net-work separately will still be alive and kicking at that point.

Analysts generally agree that mobile, cloud, and pervasive computing technologies will fundamentally shift the expecta-tions and roles of IT in the enterprise. The role of IT is moving from one of simply managing physical assets to that of being a broker of IT services from inside and outside the business. In fact, it is estimated that more than 80 percent of enterprises are looking to evaluate, acquire, and deploy integrated systems in the next 12 months. This chapter discusses what is driving this new activity and how the next generation of convergence can help businesses manage change.

The Evolution of the Data Center in the Changing World

These days, you’re managing more data and more complexity. You’re managing at the speed of the competition. And you’re responding to new and diverse opportunities. The pressure on IT is huge and accelerating. Big shifts driven by cloud, security, big data, mobility, and the consumerization of IT


HP Converged Infrastructure For Dummies, 2nd Edition 4(when computing choices are being made by consumers — or end users) are fundamentally changing how IT will be built and services consumed and how businesses will operate. This type of shift happens once every 10 to 15 years which means the data center and technology approaches are being challenged in ways we haven’t seen before.

The siloed approachHistorically, to keep pace with the growth of business applica-tions and the terabytes of data businesses use, data center resources were deployed in siloes. In other words, one set of resources was dedicated to one particular computing technol-ogy, business application, or line of business. These resources supported a single set of requirements and processes and could not easily be optimized or reconfigured to support actual demand. When you apply this siloed approach over and over again, to application after different application, you generally end up with inefficient, high-cost, overprovisioned models that create a condition known as IT sprawl. Until a few years ago, companies could get away with this and still compete. Unfortunately, that model is now unsustainable. Few data cen-ters were designed to accommodate the new requirements for speed, agility, and across-the-board efficiency. The siloed approach is broken. Businesses can’t do it any anymore.

The proliferation of data and need for instant accessThe world is simply creating too much data and the challenges involved in managing, storing, processing, and exploiting it call for systems to be as efficient as possible. On any given day, the world posts one billion pieces of content to Facebook, generates over 200 million tweets, and creates information using cameras, sensors, GPS-enabled devices, and transaction systems.

Social media alone facilitate instant connections to ideas and collaboration within and outside the enterprise. Companies must be able to quickly involve the customer and provide feedback in the evolution and promotion of their product or service, or they will rapidly lose ground.


HP Converged Infrastructure For Dummies, 2nd Edition Chapter 1: The Era of Convergence 5IT’s challenge these days is to secure systems and vital infor-mation in a world facing asymmetrical and relentless security threats.

By 2016, research suggests that 75 percent of the IT environment will be deployed in some type of cloud model, whether it be private, managed, or public.

In the banking sector, for example, if consumers can’t manage accounts securely — and open new ones — using any mobile device, they will find another vendor. In the healthcare sector, legislation such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) are driving hospitals and healthcare professionals to secure patient medical records, yet make them available in a split second. Patients need to be able to access their medical histo-ries as easily and securely as they can their bank accounts.

Examining the Fundamental FlawRegardless of the business sector you’re in, the fundamental flaw within the IT infrastructure is quite simple: The underly-ing data center technologies and the way IT is set up are no longer aligned to the way applications are built, managed, and consumed. For instance, companies no longer have years to plan an application then nine months to develop version 1.0 and another nine months to develop version 2.0. They can no longer take ten weeks to deliver a new service. Today, things happen in weeks or days.

Companies can no longer build overprovisioned and under-utilized technology silos that waste time and money, and that can’t be easily repurposed for other workloads.

As shown in Figure 1-1, today’s world requires that the appli-cation be aligned to the business. Yet server, storage, and network silos create complexity and don’t align to today’s requirements. This has locked in IT service delivery at the speed of yesterday. It continues to lock in low data center uti-lization rates. And it has created an unsustainable IT spend-ing pattern where more than 70 percent of the budget and resources are required for mere maintenance and operations to keep the lights on and less than 30 percent of time and


HP Converged Infrastructure For Dummies, 2nd Edition 6money on innovation and things that’ll help the business be more competitive.

Figure 1-1: A fundamental data center flaw is holding back innovation.

Combine that with the higher costs of energy, limited space and capacity, and fewer resources and you can see why busi-ness speed and agility are suffering. As a result, the gap is widening between what the business demands and what IT can deliver.

One reason IT spends most of its time on operations and maintenance is the complexity involved in provisioning new applications — as shown in Figure 1-2. The processes for getting things done are cumbersome, time consuming, and unsustainable. For example, you may need to take as many as ten steps for a new finance or HR application:

1. A business need is requested.

2. Planning and approval meetings are held.

3. Assets are located or new systems are ordered if necessary.

4. Set up the servers, storage, and networking.

5. Test and in some cases develop the application.

6. Deploy the application.

7. Load and patch the operating system (OS).

8. Incorporate the virtualization software.

9. Set approvals, test, and pilot.

10. Bring it all online.


HP Converged Infrastructure For Dummies, 2nd Edition Chapter 1: The Era of Convergence 7

Figure 1-2: The complexities created by siloed IT solutions.

So when the business requests a new application or service from IT, it can take weeks or months for the application to be up and running. The gotta have it now mindset is why the role of IT has never been more critical and why infrastructure convergence has gained such huge traction. A converged infrastructure addresses the problem of siloed architectures by aligning the application with the business.

Embracing the Infrastructure Convergence Trend

Infrastructure convergence is regarded as the most optimal approach to simplify and speed IT, lower operations costs, enable more innovation, and drive business agility. But there’s more to it. It’s not a stretch to believe that tomorrow’s leading organizations will be the ones that capitalize on tech-nology rather than become paralyzed by it. These organiza-tions will explore more innovative ways to run the business with better methods to meet changing customer demands. They will interact with customers, constituents, employees, and partners more quickly, and with greater personalization and involvement. And they will have the most flexible IT infra-structure that can meet the ever-broadening requirements by the lines of business to transact efficiently, effectively, and securely.


HP Converged Infrastructure For Dummies, 2nd Edition 8In essence, these organizations will adopt a new style of business — powered by a converged infrastructure that optimally aligns the infrastructure with the applications and with the business.


Chapter 2

Infrastructure Convergence Basics

In This Chapter▶ Looking at infrastructure convergence and shared services basics▶ Starting on a convergence journey▶ Examining the business value of convergence▶ Understanding infrastructure convergence and cloud computing

D ifferent IT providers and industry analysts use various terms to describe the concept of a converged infra-

structure. This chapter provides a high-level understanding of infrastructure convergence and the effort and actions required to get there. We discuss the benefits it can deliver and the behind-the-scenes principles of convergence, and give a bit more insight into how cloud computing fits in. We also discuss things to look for in your vendor.

Converged infrastructure is the ideal approach for:

✓ Increasing IT speed and agility

✓ Shifting resources from operations to innovation

✓ Enabling cloud computing

✓ Consolidating IT systems and processes

✓ Protecting mission-critical workloads

✓ Upgrading or converging applications

✓ Extending virtualization across the data center

✓ Improving energy efficiency


HP Converged Infrastructure For Dummies, 2nd Edition 10

Infrastructure Convergence BasicsAt the highest level, infrastructure convergence seeks to break down costly and inefficient dedicated IT silos and opti-mally align IT to your applications and your business. The goal is to simplify the user experience and accelerate time to service no matter what size the workload is. Infrastructure convergence helps you deploy flexible solutions managed though a common platform and all aligned to today’s applica-tion-centric data center world. You have different options for how to achieve that:

✓ Deploy modular technologies that optimally integrate servers, storage, and networking to create virtualized shared pools of interoperable resources

✓ Turnkey integrated systems

Either way, the goal is to accelerate application delivery in a predictable, repeatable manner for any workload. This pre-dictability enables IT to provision multiple services and appli-cations in minutes instead of weeks or months, and it shifts IT resources from operations to innovation.

Simplifying for a New Style of ITBuilding a shared-services model starts by bringing all server, storage, and networking resources together into a common pool. This approach also brings together integrated manage-ment tools, policies, processes, and even people so resources and applications are all managed through one central oper-ating environment in a highly systematic manner. It brings together security and power and cooling capabilities so sys-tems and facilities work together as shown in Figure 2-1.

When you create this type of converged, service-ready infrastructure, you’re able to dynamically, efficiently, and automatically orchestrate and provision elements (compute, storage, networking), and then return these assets back to the resource pool when the services are completed. These modular elements are assembled to handle specific workloads and to be rapidly scalable and optimized for energy efficiency, high utilization rates, and with built-in availability.


Chapter 2: Infrastructure Convergence Basics 11

Figure 2-1: A shared services model helps align workloads to the business.

And by enabling common management of these shared resources, you’re able to simultaneously control, optimize, and orchestrate all infrastructure elements required to deliver a service — with the ability to instantly respond to changing business demands in a predictable, repeatable way.

This type of application-centric environment breaks down siloed, hierarchical, point-to-point infrastructures into an easily managed, energy-efficient, and reusable set of resources. Creating resources that are easy to use is the best way to extract the most value from your technology, people, and processes. For example:

✓ Business growth can be accelerated by efficiently deploy-ing new applications and services, with optimum utiliza-tion across servers, storage, networking, and power.

✓ On-demand delivery of applications and services can be achieved in minutes, not weeks or months.

✓ Employee productivity will go up as human capital is moved from operations to innovation through the use of IT productivity tools (templates) and best practices and by increasing the automation of application, infrastruc-ture, and facility management. This is critically important in today’s economy and competitive landscape.



It’s a JourneyGaining the value of infrastructure convergence doesn’t mean you need to change your entire IT organization all at once. Every organization has its own starting point and desired destination.

Think of converging your infrastructure as both a journey and a destination across some or all of your data center. You can reach this destination either by transforming your own IT environment or by leveraging the resources within an out-sourcing provider’s converged infrastructure.

If you choose to converge on your own (with or without the assistance from your technology provider), you can get there fast by deploying a completely new next-generation data center via a modular data center solution. You can quickly meet the needs of new greenfield or high priority areas (for instance, big data, virtualization, or cloud) by deploying converged, integrated systems. And you can also choose an incremental approach by deploying modern individual server, storage, and/or networking technologies that can build on each other because they’re designed for convergence. The important thing is to stop waiting — get on board with convergence now.

A Forrester Research study conducted in the second half of 2012 reports that 22 percent of enterprises have adopted a converged infrastructure solution. Of that 22 percent, 15 per-cent say they’re looking to expand their current deployment, while an additional 26 percent report being in the planning stages of implementing a converged infrastructure solution.

If your organization is taking the incremental approach to converging infrastructure, three main steps can help get you from where you are today to a fully converged infrastructure: standardize, virtualize, and automate.

Which step you enter into (standardize, virtualize, automate) will depend on the maturity of your current data center when you start. Always start with a technology vendor that can offer you an assessment service (often free of charge). This will help you figure out where in your convergence journey you are and help determine practical next steps or even a road map of how to move to your desired state. Another benefit of doing a convergence assessment is that it not only


Chapter 2: Infrastructure Convergence Basics 13includes technology recommendations but also the manage-ment, people, process, and governance requirements. It’s a great tool and process to help you make well-informed decisions.

StandardizationFor most organizations, the first step to converged infrastruc-ture is standardization, which helps increase the quality and speed of IT service delivery. Embracing open, industry stan-dards–based solutions also lowers the cost of operations and creates better, more efficient management. Standardization could include moving to a small number of approved stan-dard configurations implemented in a consistent fashion with consistent management tools. As a result, you gain a more standards-based, modular, and reusable infrastructure.

Consolidation is often a part of the standardization process. The various elements of a converged infrastructure have been designed to work together in a consolidated fashion, so redun-dant components between server, storage, and networking are eliminated. For example, overprovisioning and complex cabling for servers, storage, and networking are no longer necessary. And by having fewer standardized building blocks, business and IT attain better alignment right away because it’s easier to exploit the benefits of virtualization with manage-ment and support across your systems. Components are more easily added or redeployed based on demand for particular applications. Such standardization gives you a whole new level of flexibility and agility.

VirtualizationVirtualization, the second step in converging your infra-structure, enables IT to share physical servers, storage, and networking equipment across data and applications. In virtu-alization, physical assets become virtual. The infrastructure tends to be pooled and sharable. As a result, virtualization increases asset utilization, drives greater ability to handle periods of peak business demand, encourages faster deploy-ment of new applications, improves service levels, and maxi-mizes reliability and operational efficiency. Virtualization ensures that the system is used at maximum utilization with minimum waste.


HP Converged Infrastructure For Dummies, 2nd Edition 14This increases the quality of service and begins to make IT more responsive and aligned to the needs of the business.

Different types of virtualization include the following:

✓ Server virtualization is a way to increase resource utiliza-tion by partitioning physical servers into multiple virtual servers with each running its own operating environment and applications. The virtual machine acts like a real computer.

✓ I/O virtualization delivers connection capacity and flex-ibility needed to accommodate the wide range of work-loads and applications.

✓ Storage virtualization works not just within an array, but across the entire storage environment to scale up and out, and continually balance performance and capacity.

✓ Network I/O virtualization supports the creation of VLANs (virtual local area networks) with the goal of improving the network efficiency and increasing flexibil-ity to quickly allocate required bandwidth.

✓ Network virtualization is critical as the new virtual-ized workloads fundamentally change the network traf-fic patterns. With virtual networking, the network can gracefully adapt to the needs of different tenants, users, applications, and devices. IT no longer has to build and manage inflexible tiers of networks to accommodate the needs for wired, wireless, and secure remote connectivity.

✓ Client virtualization is the practice of hosting a desktop operating system within a virtual machine (VM) running on a centralized server and with the option of supporting thin clients.

Today, several technology providers offer preintegrated con-verged systems that are architected as foundational building blocks for virtualization, particularly server and storage vir-tualization. They’re designed to minimize unused resources because resources are already virtualization-aware and virtual machine-ready. You need a management software platform that can manage both virtual and physical servers to work with your installed base and allow you to manage how fast to move into the virtualized world.

Network virtualization has similar resource pooling and utiliza-tion advantages. It enables the same converged infrastructure


Chapter 2: Infrastructure Convergence Basics 15to be shared securely. In addition, with network virtualization, the converged infrastructure scales up with demand with-out increasing complexity. Physical and virtual networking devices are combined and linked to present a simple abstrac-tion to applications. Applications running on virtual machines can take advantage of virtual application networks (VAN) to accelerate deployment and migration. Together, server, stor-age, and network virtualization enable automated application resource orchestration.

AutomationAutomation, the third step in moving toward a converged infrastructure, helps you run IT-as-a-service and be fully aligned with business requirements. An automated environ-ment accelerates time to value for virtually any IT service. It accelerates service provisioning, responsiveness, agility, disaster recovery, and, ultimately, IT innovation. In other words, IT can run at the speed of business. The key elements of an automated IT infrastructure include:

✓ A self-service portal where IT and business users can quickly request and procure IT services

✓ A service catalog of infrastructure deployment best practices

✓ A resource pool with compute, storage, and networking resources

✓ Automated infrastructure provisioning and policies that deliver the service in minutes, not months

✓ Capacity planning and management tools to keep the resources and services healthy and optimized

Business Value of a Converged Infrastructure

A converged infrastructure provides both technical and busi-ness efficiencies. At the highest level, converged infrastruc-ture solutions enable IT to become an innovation engine for business growth and offer significant value across a variety of applications.


HP Converged Infrastructure For Dummies, 2nd Edition 16Compared to traditional piece-part infrastructure, converged infrastructures are able to reduce complexity, pool resources, and aid in automating IT processes while lowering costs and increasing IT’s ability to respond to the needs of the business.

A recent Forrester study commissioned by HP surveyed 100 North American and European IT infrastructure and opera-tions decision makers at enterprise firms. They asked whether converged infrastructure solutions had resulted in certain changes to their internal budgets and operations. Using check box responses, 73 percent of the decision makers said they’d noticed improved responsiveness to new business require-ments, 40 percent indicated the ability to shift resources from maintenance to new initiatives, and 30 percent said converged infrastructure allowed the merging of previously separate teams for a more cohesive organization. Survey respondents report both an improvement in their ability to respond to business demands and an improvement in their ability to devote resources to new initiatives as opposed to ongoing maintenance.

The following list goes over a few of the many examples of how convergence accelerates value:

✓ Better asset utilization through aggressive consolida-tion, centralization, and integration of servers, storage, and network assets using technologies such as server, storage, and network virtualization.

✓ Increased IT staff efficiency by reducing administrative costs associated with system, data, and application main-tenance and migration.

✓ Increased agility and IT responsiveness by breaking down siloed, hierarchical, point-to-point infrastructures into an easily managed, energy-efficient, and reusable set of resources to enable faster, automated provisioning of IT assets and more reliable, timely recovery of data and applications.

✓ Simplification through automation, cloud, and prepack-aged, workload-optimized systems. And better disaster recovery by simplifying multisite failover and reducing downtime to seconds.

✓ Modernization of the network infrastructure by replac-ing complex and brittle legacy networks with simple but highly scalable and resilient networks.


Chapter 2: Infrastructure Convergence Basics 17 ✓ Increased security by fortifying IT through security

solutions that are quick to install, update security filters more often, and block more attacks.

✓ Increased sustainability by knowing actual power usage and delivering the most IT per watt and space.

✓ Improved return on investment (ROI) by increasing utili-zation and data center capacity, leveraging your existing investments, and reducing energy costs.

✓ Lowered costs by lowering capital expenses resulting from higher utilization, less cabling, fewer network con-nections, and reducing labor via automated data center management.

Infrastructure Convergence and Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a way to build, manage, secure, transform, and consume IT that makes private and public resources (such as services, applications, servers, storage, and net-works) flexible, dynamic, and available on demand. Many folks define cloud computing as the next stage in the evolu-tion of the Internet to provide everything-as-a-service when-ever and wherever you need it, while paying only for what services you consume.

There are three types of clouds:

✓ In a private cloud, the cloud assets are typically oper-ated solely for a single entity or client and may be located on or off the premises. They may be owned and managed by that entity or a third party.

✓ With a public cloud, the cloud assets are shared and ser-vice is provided to multiple entities on a pay-per-usage basis. All assets are owned and operated by the provider.

✓ A hybrid cloud is the best of both worlds, combining the security of the private cloud with the convenience and cost-effectiveness of the public version. Most organiza-tions will have a hybrid IT environment that includes some form of cloud computing as well as traditional IT approaches.


HP Converged Infrastructure For Dummies, 2nd Edition 18This is exactly why infrastructure convergence is so impor-tant. A converged infrastructure provides the foundation for all IT requirements including cloud deployments — enabling you to not only identify IT services and applications that should be migrated into cloud environments but also to manage on-premises and cloud resources through one and the same shared services catalog — not to mention the ability to gain additional, short-term capacity through bursting from a converged infrastructure to the cloud.

Be cautious when putting together a piecemeal cloud solution. It may lead to lower capital expenditures but create new chal-lenges in order to get these applications to share on-premise resources and applications, create security issues, and lead to increased operational costs.

Business users have been quick to recognize the cloud’s advantages in speeding innovation, accelerating business pro-cesses, reducing costs, and reducing time to revenue. There is no doubt that cloud computing is hot. Use it to your advan-tage when and where it makes sense — for instance, if you’re just getting started, you may want to select one workload type just as test and development.

In a recent Forrester Research study, private clouds have become the preferred choice for developers: 70 percent of firms report that their developers are most interested in an approach that involves private cloud. Of those, 41 percent are most inter-ested in internal private cloud, while the remaining 29 percent are most interested in a hybrid solution involving private cloud.

This makes converged infrastructure solutions ideal for devel-opers, because the speed, low capital cost, and scalability of these systems create the ideal platform for a private cloud.


Chapter 3

What to Look for When Choosing a Converged

InfrastructureIn This Chapter▶ Looking at requirements and design principles▶ Eying foundational architecture▶ Asking whether infrastructure convergence is for the medium-sized

business▶ Looking for a technology provider

C hoosing the right infrastructure solution has far-reaching impact, and this chapter helps ensure the decision is

sound. Regardless of the scale of the infrastructure, it must be aligned with various application needs. Converged infrastruc-ture solutions enable all resources and processes to be coor-dinated in order to make the most efficient use of IT, facility, and staff resources. So whether you start small with modern technologies designed for convergence or deploy ready-to-go converged, integrated systems, the base or core design and foundational architectural principles should be part of your solution evaluation. For information on what HP offers in this sphere, see Chapter 5.



Design PrinciplesRegardless of your technology provider, a converged infra-structure incorporates overarching design principles that are fundamental requirements of convergence. These areas bring the core technologies together in an optimal manner and make it easier to align your people and processes to gain the full value of convergence. A converged infrastructure is:

✓ Virtualized: You virtualize all heterogeneous resources: server, storage, networking, I/O, and desktops and cli-ents. Virtualization separates the applications, data, and network connections from the underlying hardware, making it easier and faster to reallocate resources to match the changing needs of individual applications and virtualization software.

✓ Resilient: You integrate mission-critical technologies and high availability and security policies. Because diverse applications share virtualized resource pools, the infra-structure must have a resilient and highly secure operat-ing environment that automates high-availability policies to meet service level agreements (SLAs) and provides the right level of availability for each business application.

✓ Open: You build on modern, standard, and common plat-form and network architectures and management aligned to your preferred virtual machine platform, operating systems, and applications. This enables your organiza-tion to leverage your existing investments as part of the consolidation and convergence process and adopt new technologies incrementally and at your own pace with the required flexibility to run, support, and optimize your applications.

✓ Orchestrated: You orchestrate the business request with the applications, data, and infrastructure. You define the policies and service levels through automated workflows, provisioning, and change management. This creates an application-aligned infrastructure that can be scaled up or down based on the needs of each application. Orchestration also provides centralized management of the resource pool, including billing, metering, and chargeback for consumption. For example, orchestra-tion reduces the time and effort for deploying multiple


Chapter 3: What to Look for When Choosing a Converged Infrastructure 21instances of a single application. And as the requirement for more resources or a new application is triggered, automated tools perform tasks that before could only be done by multiple administrators operating on their indi-vidual pieces of the physical stack.

✓ Modular: You build on modular design principles with technologies engineered for convergence. This allows you to integrate new, modern technologies with existing investments without having to start over. This approach also allows you to extend new capabilities and scale capacity over time with common, modular components across the data center — from x86 to the most demanding, mission-critical systems.

Foundational Architectural Principles

Converged infrastructure relies on a common set of components you can use to build IT solutions or as the basis for turnkey integrated systems. These components provide a core that enhances the entire IT environment because they’re associated with a comprehensive set of service definition, deployment, and management tools.

This set of tools is used in a standardized fashion that enables you to provision services from pools of physical or virtual resources including servers, storage, and networking. Users make requests from portals, APIs, or other interfaces and the services are allocated automatically over the converged net-work. The requests are examined and then delivered to users through the use of service catalogs based on business service level agreements (SLAs).

Each SLA offers a predetermined amount of scalability, avail-ability, and disaster recovery. Available resources are moni-tored at the infrastructure, application, and end user levels to make sure that needs are met. Services are available on demand and are elastic to make sure they’re available during workload spikes, for instance when workers typically arrive at work and log in for the day.


HP Converged Infrastructure For Dummies, 2nd Edition 22Most enterprises will have a multisourced environment for the foreseeable future. So no matter where IT services are from, they must be sourced, delivered, and governed in the same way and align to workloads so that the various pieces can work together rather than against each other.

Any converged infrastructure architecture you invest in should support components from any source as long as they include modern, industry-standard technologies based on common architectures. You need to be able to change parts in and out as you like without worrying about lock in. Look for solutions that can be delivered at your own pace and in different ways: on-premises, outsourced, via the cloud, as a traditional stack, or as a hybrid model.

A converged infrastructure doesn’t exist in isolation. It pro-vides infrastructure services for business processes and applications. And it must take part in the existing enterprise management systems. Make sure your solution is able to link into large-scale automation flows, the IT service management processes, and the tools that ensure availability and perfor-mance of business.

For example, you probably want to include the following functions:

✓ Automatic provisioning of servers, storage, networking, and operating systems, which can be used by higher level automation workflows for setting up a whole business application, including user data and code.

✓ Use configuration information from the converged infra-structure, along with events and performance informa-tion to manage the health of business processes and applications. Your converged infrastructure can be controlled by your Service Desk’s change management process. And it can feed information up into a Service Manager’s event-to-resolution process.

✓ Your converged infrastructure configuration can be automatically scanned for compliance, ensuring that it complies with regulations and the enterprise’s own compliance standards.


Chapter 3: What to Look for When Choosing a Converged Infrastructure 23

Infrastructure Convergence for Medium-Sized Enterprises

The speed of the new world has no bounds. It affects all businesses in varying degrees, including medium-sized busi-nesses. Convergence makes good sense to this group because medium-sized businesses don’t have the luxury of having large numbers of IT staff, so their technology must simplify their processes and capacity requirements. For a medium-sized business, infrastructure convergence could mean the difference between thriving and merely surviving.

Like the larger enterprise, older, less flexible, and more costly infrastructures are absorbing too much of your limited resources including both people and hard dollars. Finding some balance is difficult, especially when you factor in realities like data growth and complexity, business disruptions, communi-cation breakdowns, increased competition, and consolidation and growth initiatives such as potential acquisitions.

You want to keep your business up and running no matter what: optimizing consolidation and virtualization, simplifying delivery of critical business applications, accelerating analysis and decision making, and allowing your people to work more productively. For information on how HP can help your medium-sized business, flip to Chapter 5.

What to Look For in Your Technology Provider

Whether you start with smaller technology projects, deploy the newest converged and integrated systems, or embark on a complete transformation, evaluate these areas of your vendor to ensure the safest and fastest path to convergence value based on your unique business objectives and requirements:


HP Converged Infrastructure For Dummies, 2nd Edition 24 ✓ Convergence approach: Look for technology providers

that offer a portfolio of solutions designed, built, and delivered for the way the data must align to the busi-ness. In other words, solutions designed for the different categories of apps that span your entire IT or data center ecosystem:

•Massive scale or hyperscale applications, which are single applications that run on hundreds or even thousands of systems.

•Mainstreamapplications that require very few sys-tems, yet each instance still needs to be spun up, managed, maintained, and so on.

•Business-criticalapplications that require a high degree of security, availability, and compliance — and simply can’t go down.

✓ Intellectual property (IP): To create a converged infra-structure, you need to look for vendors with a complete, integrated portfolio of servers, storage, networking, management software, and energy optimization — with purposeful IP designed for convergence from the outset. Whether you deploy individual technologies or converged systems, the important thing to remember is that you want a technology provider with a best-in-class reputa-tion and support track record across all those areas. You must have confidence that each individual component is sound and strong and that each is architected to work with all the other components.

✓ Open integration: Being able to support a heterogeneous environment is critical — whether it be the servers, the network, the storage, the management software, or any other element. Open integration allows you to deploy converged infrastructure solutions the way you need to, whether in your existing environment or for new green-field opportunities. To help, your technology vendor should have broad programs to deliver integrated solu-tions based on open standards. Each offering should be tightly integrated and pretested and bring together all the key hardware, software, and services components you need. This is especially true as you move parts of your IT environment to the cloud or need to support heterogeneous compute stacks.


Chapter 3: What to Look for When Choosing a Converged Infrastructure 25 ✓ Partnerecosystemstrength:Your vendor or partner

should have an extensive application development ecosystem (for example, independent software vendors, independent hardware vendors, channel partners, and system integrators) because infrastructures don’t exist in vacuums. You make the decision first about the applica-tion and then about the best infrastructure on which to deploy it. So it’s absolutely critical to work with a tech-nology vendor whose systems have been configured and tested with the specific applications you want to use.

✓ Standards-based:In addition to trusting the supplier across the entire IT stack, you need to make sure the building blocks themselves are based on industry stan-dards. As a best practice, select a supplier that uses industry-standard components and interfaces (such as application plug-ins). This way, you can deploy the components in your existing data center plus easily and quickly migrate to new components as needed.

✓ Expertise and experience: To build a better enterprise, you need a steady pair of hands. Remember, most com-panies will build out a hybrid converged infrastructure environment that includes a mix of on-premise, out-sourced, and cloud solutions. This type of mix requires a vendor that has the proven expertise to consult, design, finance, secure, and build the fabric, including the facility. Because this is a new technology, a broad services port-folio and a track record of success from the supplier are critical. You’re going to want services from the vendor to help you successfully deploy the right solution in the shortest reasonable time. As converged infrastructure solutions become more prevalent, or as technologies designed for convergence get refreshed, any reputable vendor will provide skills, technical training, and certi-fications to help the organizations’ functional domain experts evolve and succeed. Such programs enable you to gain the skills you need to integrate servers, storage, and networks into open, common platforms — whether you’re a technical veteran or a relative newcomer.




Chapter 4

How Convergence Affects You

In This Chapter▶ Examining some organizational roles and responsibilities for C-level

executives▶ Looking at roles for other employees

H ow does creating a converged infrastructure envi-ronment affect the various job functions within the

business and IT organizations? This chapter goes over that information.

Changing Organizational Roles for CEOs and CFOs

Today’s CEOs must react to the speed of the market while finding optimal ways to create sustainable growth to drive new revenue and profit goals. In a time of massive changes in how goods and services are purchased and received, the new imperative is to align, adapt, and even reinvent the business — on the fly — in order to survive and thrive.



At the same time, the CEO and CFO are balancing aggressive-ness with predictability and control. IT costs and resources must be kept in line with business costs. Nimble enterprises will achieve this balance by weaving technology into every-thing they do. The CEO is going to be placing even more pressure on the CIO and IT staff to meet these diverse require-ments. IT must become a strategic line item, rather than a budget line item.

Changing Organizational Roles for CIOs and CTOs

CIOs and CTOs are turning to infrastructure convergence to deliver greater IT speed, agility, and value. Together, these functions typically drive IT strategy and strategic technology decisions related to applications and operations. They also help drive organizational change and alignment across the business. In effect, the CIO is becoming a service broker and possibly the most important role in the organization.

In this role, the CIO is no longer isolated but very connected to the Lines of Business. They must increase actionable infor-mation to help meet business objectives. They must build and maintain a network of trusted partners and suppliers that can be relied on to deliver services at a predictable price and level of performance. Internally, they must build a service delivery channel that offers tangible value to the business by control-ling cost, meeting customer satisfaction, and therefore driving incremental revenue and profitability.

Top concerns for this group ✓ Business growth and innovation

✓ Business cost management

✓ Improved customer satisfaction

✓ Quality management

✓ Competitive advantage

✓ Improved security/risk management

✓ Energy and sustainability require-ments


Chapter 4: How Convergence Affects You 29Two of the CIO’s main go-forward decisions when it comes to convergence are

✓ Determine what staffing is required in terms of conver-gence skills and hire to fill any gap.

✓ Figure out how best to deploy a hybrid delivery model. This model combines IT service delivery from multiple sources — including traditional IT, cloud, outsourcing, and hosted services.

This will give the CIO more freedom to select a delivery method that makes the most business sense by matching appropriate costs and capabilities to specific needs. For example, if he or she seeks to leverage public or private cloud services, the CIO will become the lead change agent for both business and IT processes and staffing expertise in order to maximize the benefits of cloud technologies and ready the enterprise for accelerated innovation and improved agility. Otherwise, they risk creating silos that introduce cost, com-plexity, and risk to hybrid environments.

Changing Organizational Roles for System Architects and Planning

The System Architect or Strategic Planner typically designs the data center strategy that anticipates future needs while efficiently satisfying short-term requirements. An executive at this level tracks new technologies as they relate to the holistic view of the infrastructure. And they must look for the right open standards to identity and embrace for their company. Interoperability, architecture, uptime, bandwidth, and agility are top concerns. The System Architect or Strategic Planner is a key change agent to ensure not just that the technology is right but also that the processes, people, and culture are aligned.



With infrastructure convergence, the System Architect or Strategic Planner is balancing the old, siloed environment with the new world of business. Technology is developing at a pace much faster than the enterprise’s ability to adopt inno-vation, which is really the root of the problem. The System Architect plays a key role in rethinking and planning how IT best delivers its services.

Changing Organizational Roles for IT Directors

The IT Director is another key player in determining and approving integrated IT solutions (for example, platform shifts from rack to blades and virtualization). The promise of infra-structure convergence makes sense to IT Directors because they see how it can immediately and effectively enable their broad-scale IT initiatives such as:

✓ Data center transformation

✓ Consolidation

✓ Cloud computing

✓ Virtualization

✓ Automation

✓ Modernization

Top concerns for this group ✓ Whether the IT environment is

delivering optimal performance.

✓ Whether availability require-ments are met and disaster recovery measures are in place.

✓ How to secure customer, com-pany, and partner data amid tighter audit and regulatory demands.

✓ How to take advantage of a more integrated environment to control physical and virtual IT sprawl.

✓ How to deploy the right skills and solutions without having vendor lock-in.

✓ How to lower operating costs so that more resources can be applied to innovation.


Chapter 4: How Convergence Affects You 31

Knowing their current environment is fairly complex, IT Directors understand how a converged infrastructure can create greater simplicity, visibility, and control. People in this position are looking for solutions that effectively address their availability, manageability, interoperability, and power and cooling concerns as well as increase staff productivity and create better coordination across siloed departments.

Changing Organizational Roles for Functional IT areas

A converged infrastructure means that the individual parts of IT will become more collapsed, creating opportunities for those that embrace convergence to become change agents. However, this isn’t an immediate change.

Specific positions will face certain issues:

✓ Server Administrators are in a prime position to better align IT demand without the burden of constant coordina-tion. They will benefit from new converged infrastructure solutions by simplifying resource provisioning, managing their infrastructure as a holistic unit, and eliminating the cause of server sprawl. Ultimately these folks may take a leadership role in managing or automating the provisioning of the applications and services for both IT and the lines of business.

✓ Network Managers currently own the core and edge net-work architecture decisions. They know that networks are at the breaking point and that a new architectural approach that provides simplified, scalable, and automated con-nectivity for virtual compute, storage, and cloud through a common data center fabric is the wave of the future. How fast they embrace this new approach in a converged envi-ronment is critical to their organizations’ success.

✓ Storage Managers coordinate with the Server and Network Managers for deployment of new application infrastructures, but they may perceive storage as part of a converged infrastructure to be a threat to their domain control. Those that take a leadership role can see how virtualized, scalable, and self-optimized storage will be an opportunity to redirect their time to more strategic activities.




Chapter 5

Examining HP Converged Infrastructure Solutions

In This Chapter▶ Accelerating convergence value at your own pace▶ Getting to know converged data centers▶ Examining HP ConvergedSystems▶ Looking into converged technologies▶ Working with small businesses

T hink of the HP Converged Infrastructure strategy and portfolio as your GPS for navigating convergence. It can

help get you to convergence in a simple, fast, safe manner based on your requirements and across all your workloads. HP Converged Infrastructure solutions are designed to sim-plify the user experience through converged platforms that are easy to buy, deploy, and manage. It’s engineered to deliver integrated system experiences and includes management that is easy to operate because of its integrated, app-aware, infrastructure-lifecycle approach and services that make the solution easy to support across its full lifecycle. In essence, Converged Infrastructure solutions are designed as a platform and delivered as a solution.

HP Converged Infrastructure gives you choices so you can integrate and tailor solutions without being locked into pro-prietary solutions and protocols. The open standard-based nature also allows scaling the infrastructure for any or all workloads quickly by using the modular ConvergedSystems. Plus, HP FlexNetwork architecture provides the ideal conver-gence building block and framework. For example, with simple


HP Converged Infrastructure For Dummies, 2nd Edition 34and highly scalable FlexFabric switching technology, you can scale to hundreds of thousands of servers in a data center, all managed through a single management console.

The goal of these attributes is to enable you to deliver services in minutes for all your workloads, while slashing time spent on maintenance. This is at the heart of delivering broad value across the data center today and for a long time to come.

One Size Doesn’t Fit AllOne size simply doesn’t fit all. With HP Converged Infrastructure solutions, organizations can take a compre-hensive, fast-track approach and get to convergence immedi-ately with HP ConvergedSystems or take a more incremental approach to achieve the desired end-state (see Figure 5-1). Most likely you will use a mix of both approaches based on your application mix and priorities by putting a big-picture plan in place that helps you move forward and change quickly as opportunities present themselves.

Whichever way you go, the HP solutions found in this chap-ter can be deployed for your preferred delivery model (on-premises, outsourced, via the cloud, or a hybrid of all three), deployed at your own pace and preference, and deployed to address all the needs of your workloads regardless of scale. This is how you can shift resources from operations to inno-vation and accelerate the value of the IT organization to the business.

Figure 5-1: The fast-track versus step-by-step approach to a Converged Infrastructure.


Chapter 5: Examining HP Converged Infrastructure Solutions 35

You can deploy:

✓ A fully operational next-generation data center delivered quickly through converged or modular data centers.

✓ A complete portfolio of integrated systems that are preengineered and workload-optimized for virtualization, cloud, and Big Data.

✓ A complete and leading portfolio of modern, modular, standards-based technology building blocks all designed for convergence.

Figure 5-2 provides a simple way to evaluate the different converged infrastructure solutions that can be deployed in a manner that protects your existing investments yet allows you to accelerate where and how it makes sense. Plus, HP provides a complete portfolio of Converged Infrastructure services and outsourcing options that hundreds of customers have deployed to accelerate their moves forward.

Agility rulesA recent HP survey confirmed the importance of agility and its impact on the success of the enterprise. Representing both private and public sectors, 95 percent of respondents said that agility is important to the success of their organizations. They cited speed — how quickly the orga-nization can implement new technol-ogy services — as the number one

benefit. HP also asked executives how important agility would become in the future. Most respondents — 77 percent of CEOs, 64 percent of CFOs, and 72 percent of CIOs — said agil-ity will be critical to success in five years. Sixty-two percent of public sector organizations also believe that agility will drive future success.



Figure 5-2: The various converged infrastructure options.

Converged Data CentersConverged Data Centers are in the class of modular data centers (complete, preconfigured data centers shipped and ready to go in comprehensive shipping containers) that expe-dite deployment and increase efficiency. HP Performance Optimized Datacenters (PODs) are data centers in portable 20-or 40-foot energy efficient containers (www.hp.com/go/pod), which are ideal for customers who need to rapidly scale their data center while reducing capital investments, opera-tional costs, and increasing their data center agility and flexibility.

The HP PODs (see Figure 5-3) deliver data center efficiency, reduced capital expenditures, and savings in energy costs as compared to traditional brick and mortar data centers. PODs are an ideal supplement to your existing data center, can be deployed as sole data centers, or are a perfect temporary bridge data center solution depending on your strategy.


http://www.hp.com/go/pod

http://www.hp.com/go/pod


Figure 5-3: The HP PODs.

HP ConvergedSystemsThe gap between what business demands and what tradi-tional IT can deliver is widening (for more details on this, see Chapter 1). Enterprises can no longer build overprovisioned and underutilized technology silos that require tons of time and money to operate and maintain, and which can’t be easily repurposed. Traditional IT is struggling to keep up with the exponential growth driven by the big trends in social, mobile, cloud, and big data.

To break free and move to the next level of IT speed, agility, efficiency, and administrator productivity, companies are looking to adopt integrated systems. This is why the inte-grated systems market is continuing to grow in popularity. These systems take standardizing and automation to new levels without losing application performance. They enable management at the systems level, not the component level. And they’re designed to simplify IT and deliver faster time to application value, which helps the business.

HP ConvergedSystems are workload-optimized engineered systems that are easy to procure, manage, and support. This creates a total systems experience that simplifies the user experience. HP ConvergedSystems are built from the ground up for virtualization, cloud, and Big Data.



HP ConvergedSystems for virtual-ization and hosted desktopsHP’s virtualization systems and approach can help you create a highly secure, end-to-end virtual data center and client environment. HP ConvergedSystems for virtualization are workload-optimized engineered systems that help busi-nesses quickly advance their virtualization requirements. They provide seamless scalability and flexibility so you can grow as your business grows and easily move to the cloud when ready. These systems are designed for simplicity and, built on standard, pre-optimized and reliable infrastructures that reduce risk and lower costs. And, they’re modular, which means you can scale them to meet future business demands.

For example, for the midmarket customer needing to imple-ment virtualization out-of-the-box, the HP ConvergedSystem 300 for Virtualization is a cost-effective, fixed configuration-based appliance that is easy to buy and use. This system simplifies the management of VMware-based environments and is built on standard and reliable modular compute and storage scalability.

For the higher performance required of the most demanding data centers, the HP ConvergedSystem 700 for Virtualization provides blade-based workload-optimized systems for vir-tualized VMware and Microsoft environments. They can be procured as preintegrated or configure-to-order systems. And all these systems provide simplified lifecycle management and user experience.

HP ConvergedSystems for the cloudCapitalizing on the cloud can be pretty complicated. The turnkey HP CloudSystem is a complete integrated offering for building and managing different types of clouds, includ-ing software, hardware, and services. The automation in CloudSystem allows you to easily provision complex services in just minutes, from infrastructure to application. And it comes with prepackaged service designs, templates, and tools for the most popular applications to help you personalize and rapidly automate cloud services.


Chapter 5: Examining HP Converged Infrastructure Solutions 39The HP CloudSystem is optimized for HP infrastructure but supports third-party infrastructure, multiple hypervisors, and operating systems. For example, you can get started with Compute and Storage as a Service, and grow to add applica-tions and service brokering across hybrid environments as your requirements and maturity grow. And with built-in out-of-the-box bursting, CloudSystem can scale as you need it to address unpredictable business demands by accessing exter-nal resources on a pay-as-you-go basis.

The CloudSystem provides application lifecycle management from provisioning to monitoring to retirement of the applica-tion (and associated infrastructure).

HP ConvergedSystems for big dataInformation is fast becoming the most vital currency of the changing enterprise. Many people think the big data challenge is all about the volume and velocity of information. However, the variety of information is also an issue.

HP ConvergedSystems for big data helps companies make sense of all this. Trying to shoehorn 21st century tech-nology into decades-old infrastructure just doesn’t work anymore. For example, to help with this problem, the HP ConvergedSystem for HAVEn was built from the ground up to help companies extract value from their data at the speed and scale required, taking advantage of big data applications like HP Vertica. The platform has been designed and built for demanding analytic workloads to provide real-time query and loading, advanced in-database analytics, and great perfor-mance without worrying about the details of how it gets done.

Another example is the HP ConvergedSystem for SAP HANA. SAP HANA technology enables processing of massive quanti-ties of real-time data in the main memory of the server to provide immediate results from analyses and transactions. The HP ConvergedSystem for SAP HANA takes that to the next level. It offers unlimited scalability and storage capacity, and provides the highest availability for mission critical SAP work-loads. All said and done, this system helps businesses react faster to business change, make informed decisions in real


HP Converged Infrastructure For Dummies, 2nd Edition 40time with actual data, discover trends and patterns before competitors do, and enable better operational planning, simu-lation, and forecasting.

HP ConvergedSystems are designed from the ground up for convergence. Each system is built for the way people work by providing a new level of seamlessness from virtualization to cloud, from physical to virtual. And each system delivers fast deployment and is built with a management control panel designed for convergence to eliminate complexity. Plus, HP ConvergedSystems allow you to integrate with your existing infrastructure so there is no rip and replace.

Converged TechnologiesObtaining more convergence value begins by using the foun-dational technologies designed for convergence and virtual-ization. This is where HP Converged Infrastructure leadership comes into play. Converged Infrastructure helps you simplify your data center, and make it more flexible, more efficient, and less expensive to operate. However, it still requires the most modern technologies designed for convergence that drive common ways of building, managing, and integrating solutions for today’s modern data center.

ServersHP ProLiant and Integrity servers are converged, standard-ized, and modernized to work with x86 and mission-critical servers. HP’s integrated approach to blade computing deliv-ers efficiencies in system management, monitoring, and provisioning.

The HP BladeSystem c-Class enclosure is the flagship HP product — it was built to work with multiple virtual machines and fast memory, in order to provide high throughput and reduce I/O bottlenecks. If you use it with HP Virtual Connect, you can wire just once and still accommodate workload migrations between servers. HP BladeSystem c-Class also allows administrators to make server additions and subtrac-tions in minutes, thus freeing network and storage adminis-trators from the constant reconfiguration demands that are typical in legacy environments.



StorageMost unified and monolithic storage deployed today was built for the needs of 20 years ago, before explosive data growth or cloud computing. Legacy storage is too expensive, complex, and isolated for today’s requirements. Plus, virtual and cloud environments are unpredictable and demand the highest levels of agility and efficiency. Legacy storage was simply not built for unpredictability.

To fully benefit from virtual and cloud computing, organiza-tions must move to modern converged storage designed for these new requirements. HP has created storage specifi-cally for a modern, virtualized world. Their modern archi-tectures include HP 3PAR solutions for primary storage, HP StoreVirtual for virtual storage, and new solutions from HP Labs to create backup and recovery solutions with HP StoreOnce systems. The HP Converged Storage portfolio can help you reap the benefits of the next wave of virtualized server, client, and cloud deployments.

HP MoonshotHP Moonshot is a software-defined server designed to drastically increase efficiency. The servers, which HP calls cartridges, go into enclosures, and each enclosure holds 45 cartridges. If you take these enclosures and put them into an industry-standard rack, you end up with ten enclosures per rack, thus moving nine full racks onto one.

The enclosures share management, power, cooling, networking, and

storage. Using Moonshot you can reduce power consumption. And it costs less than traditional servers.

A great example is that HP has already moved all of hp.com to Moonshot servers. Hp.com gets over 3 million hits per day and the com-pany is currently powering the entire site on the equivalent of 12 60-watt light bulbs. Most homes have more than 12 light bulbs!



NetworkingHP offers a complete network portfolio across the data center, campus, and branch office, which features common architec-ture, common management, and common security across the whole network to make it much simpler.

New ways of using virtualization are on the rise. For example, HP Virtual Application Networks allow you to virtualize and automate the entire configuration process — from applica-tion to network to user — based on policy-driven manage-ment. Rather than focusing on connecting users to business applications, this solution allows you to focus on the quality of experience and deploy applications very quickly. Virtual Application Networks are software-defined networks that deliver new levels of simplicity, speed, and quality assurance.

ManagementWith the proliferation of as-a-Service technology, tech-savvy workers, and increased business complexity — compounded by the exponential growth in social, mobile, cloud and big data — the gap between what the business demands and IT can deliver will continue to expand as organizations struggle to deliver tomorrow’s IT with management tools designed for another era.

This is why converged management is fast becoming the central nervous system of the data center. It’s at the heart of making the IT infrastructure simpler, faster, more powerful and efficient, and able to serve up role-specific views to dif-ferent IT stakeholders. HP offers several management solu-tions designed for convergence to help make running your data center much simpler and application-aligned for the way today’s businesses operate. For example:

✓ HP OneView helps enterprises close the IT management gap by bringing the best of the consumer world to the enterprise. Built from the ground up for convergence, it’s a consumerized IT management platform offering a modern and integrated workspace from which IT teams collaborate to capture processes, configurations, and best-practices via a software defined approach. And by eliminating many manual operations, HP OneView


Chapter 5: Examining HP Converged Infrastructure Solutions 43empowers the IT team to deploy resources at the push of a button, reduce the costs and errors of lifecycle manage-ment, and readily adapt to the enterprise as it evolves. This consumerized approach shifts the focus of infra-structure management from devices to how people actu-ally work — so IT users can deploy and manage their HP infrastructure the way the business of today operates.

✓ HP Insight Online provides the information you need to monitor the devices in your IT environment from anywhere, anytime — at no additional cost as part of your HP warranty and contract services. Through the HP Support Center portal, Insight Online provides one stop, secure access to product and HP support information specific to your IT environment. Insight Online displays IT information for devices remotely monitored by HP and lets you easily track service events and support cases, view device configurations, and proactively monitor your HP contracts and warranties as well as HP Proactive ser-vice credit balances. This saves time, reduces complex-ity, and ensures uptime.

✓ HP Integrated-Lights Management Engine is a suite of embedded management technologies that support core server lifecycle management, from initial deployment to ongoing management and service alerting. The iLO Management Engine helps simplify server setup, engage in health monitoring of power and thermal control, and promote remote administration for the most efficiently ran data center environments.

✓ HP Intelligent Management Center helps simplify the network. It consolidates management tools while still addressing new networking trends and providing visibil-ity of the entire network. It increases efficiency with tool consolidation across vendors and network functions; it provides a single-pane-of-glass management; it manages physical and virtual network devices; and it integrates fixed and mobile access control. At the time of this writing, IMC supports 6085 devices from over 220 manufacturers.

✓ Cloud Service Automation (CSA) is a comprehensive, unified cloud management platform for brokering and managing enterprise-grade application and infrastructure cloud services. The open, extensible architecture allows you to easily adapt to changing business requirements while supporting heterogeneous IT environments.



Bringing Convergence Value to Life

The value of convergence can’t be fully realized through piece-part, bolted together solutions: It requires core innova-tions at the intersection points that are deeply embedded into the solution. Here are a few of the HP investments and innova-tions that represent some of the HP Converged Infrastructure secret sauce:

✓ HP BladeSystem: HP BladeSystem is an advanced blade infrastructure with a future looking design and embed-ded intelligence that serves as a foundation for con-verged infrastructure solutions and the software defined data center.

✓ HP Virtual Connect: This technology removes most of the networking equipment required in a legacy rack mount and standalone server environment. Plus, based on the difference of traditional interconnect and adapter power costs compared to Virtual Connect, you wire once and consume less power.

Virtual Connect helps you work with cloud computing in virtual environments because you only need to wire things once. For example, Virtual Connect flattens the network and enables faster EAST to WEST server commu-nication. With HP BladeSystem with Virtual Connect you don’t have to hop to Edge switches before communicat-ing server to server (common in virtual server environ-ments). HP Virtual Connect can deliver lower latency.

✓ HP Virtual Connect for 3PAR with Flat SAN technology: Legacy, multitier Fibre Channel network architectures require a complex web of network cards, interconnects, cables, and switches in order to keep pace with this changing traffic. This approach creates performance bottlenecks and drives higher costs and complexity to build, maintain, and secure at scale. HP Virtual Connect for 3PAR with Flat SAN technology offers a direct connec-tion to Fibre Channel-based storage. It helps you reduce storage networking costs, enables faster provisioning, requires fewer components, and reduces latency.


Chapter 5: Examining HP Converged Infrastructure Solutions 45 ✓ HP StoreOnce: HP StoreOnce Backup with StoreOnce

Catalyst is a federated deduplication solution. These solutions have been designed from the ground up to overcome the gaps, inefficiencies, and costs associated with fragmented, first-generation deduplication technolo-gies to deliver faster backup and restore speeds.

It helps you meet the needs of shrinking backup windows and challenging RTO/RPO commitments. It’s flexible with the ability to do deduplicate and replicate backup from anywhere to anywhere. And it’s federated through a single deduplication engine deployed where you want, with no need for data rehydration.

✓ HP SmartCache: Applications are the lifeblood of your business and server design matters to applications. HP SmartCache is a controller-based read caching solution in a DAS environment that caches the most frequently accessed data onto lower latency SSDs to dynamically accelerate application workloads. HP SmartCache pro-vides seamless integration into your data center with no application or operating system changes. It includes uni-fied management so that you can manage your array and HP SmartCache through the Array Configuration Utility (ACU), and it provides performance and efficiency gains by utilizing your existing HP ProLiant Gen8 server technology.

✓ HP Cloud Maps: IDC research indicates that on average it takes ten weeks to deploy an IT service from the time of first request. In many organizations it can take as long as three to six months. HP Cloud Maps allow you to create application environments quickly. Instead of spending up to ten weeks in a manual process, it often takes less than an hour from the time you obtain a Cloud Map until the application is available to users. Cloud Maps allow you to quickly design new infrastructure and business ser-vices. They enable repeatable, proven deployments that lower risk and increase performance and service levels. HP Cloud Maps eliminate design and ongoing application maintenance errors. And they check for compliance and deploy patches.



Solutions for Micro and Small Business

HP Just Right IT (JRIT) features technology products and solutions designed for a growing business. Featuring afford-ability and long-term dependability, these servers, storage, software, networking, and services and support options can meet the technology demands of the small and midsize busi-ness. You can use them to run applications to create and share files and securely transfer and archive important busi-ness assets. Collaborative work environments built around products like HP Networking switches and the HP MicroServer help drive more efficient and profitable business operations. And because all the products stand alone effectively or work together efficiently, they still work as the needs and the size of the business evolve. For example:

✓ Networking provides reliable connectivity in a simple, easy-to-use solution, as well as the flexibility to meet the needs of mobile workers.

✓ Storage systems secure and share data and backup soft-ware options to keep data in the cloud.

✓ Budget-friendly server models, including the HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8, support essential operations while saving on money and space.

✓ Flexible service and support choices are designed just for small business needs.

Plus, midsize businesses can drive down costs with JRIT Consolidation Solutions-Virtualization Bundles. And mid-size businesses can implement JRIT Unified Communication and Collaboration to ensure continuous uptime for their mobile organizations with JRIT Secure Access and Continuity Solutions.


Chapter 6

How HP Can HelpIn This Chapter▶ Examining the HP Converged Infrastructure Capability Model▶ Finding HP tools and workshops that help you move forward with

confidence▶ Getting HP to help kick-start your cloud journey▶ Finding HP services that help you transform or evolve at your own

pace

O ne single convergence solution to meet every appli-cation need doesn’t exist. In fact, most enterprises

deploy different solutions to meet their mix of hyperscale, mainstream, and business-critical applications. HP provides a collection of practical ways to help you get started on the right path. This chapter discusses some key programs HP has developed to help you evolve to a new style of IT.

HP Converged Infrastructure Capability Model

If you’re uncertain of how best to move forward with the many decisions you have to make around cloud, on-premise, and hybrid solutions, take a look at the current state of your IT environment, look at your goals, and examine your IT orga-nizational structure, roles, and work environments. Once you have a clear picture of the current state, you can determine what needs to change in order to effectively manage your new architecture.



HP helps enterprises examine these considerations with the HP Converged Infrastructure Capability Model (CI-CM). HP CI-CM is an assessment tool and process for large and small enterprises that delivers a step-by-step, customized road map to help you reach your desired Converged Infrastructure state. It all starts with the existing environment and provides a high-level roadmap that prioritizes IT investments based on your business objectives.

The HP CI-CM is led by HP professionals or authorized HP channel partner services professionals and it helps you gather and review data about your current IT organization and busi-ness goals. HP provides you with:

✓ An in-depth analysis of the steps your organization can take to become a converged infrastructure.

✓ A half-day workshop to discuss the results and priorities for your IT organization.

✓ A pragmatic, action-oriented set of specific recommendations.

✓ A high-level, step-by-step suggested road map to help you move toward a converged infrastructure.

HP CI-CM uses a broad set of real-world metrics. These are based on research data from more than 1,500 companies. The metrics also take into account industry best practices for aligning IT with business goals. They focus on operational effi-ciency, quality of service, and IT agility. HP evaluates your IT organization’s current state across four domains:

HP factsHP has over 11,000 Enterprise server, storage, and network engineers; over 4,600 HP AllianceONE part-ners; 6,000 high-availability experts; 16,000 Microsoft-trained profes-sionals; 5,000 network infrastructure and voice professionals; an installed

base of over 1,000,000 customers; customers in over 90 percent of the Fortune 100; and available support 24x7, 365 days per year, covering 24 time zones in over 30 languages and 170 countries.


Chapter 6: How HP Can Help 49 ✓ Technology and architecture: HP CI-CM considers both

HP and non-HP hardware, software, network, and infra-structure applications. Maturity in this domain ranges from dedicated IT resources to cost-effective, pooled, shared, and automated resources.

✓ Management tools and processes: HP examines the existing resources you have available to plan, manage, and improve infrastructure service delivery.

✓ Culture and IT staff: HP measures your IT organizational structure, roles, responsibilities, and work environments.

✓ Demand, supply, and IT governance: HP measures your business’s demand for infrastructure services and how they’re delivered by your IT organization.

Across these four domains, CI-CM gathers information that helps HP analyze your infrastructure’s current and desired state against five stages of maturity:

✓ Stage 1: Silo (least mature): IT is dedicated to individual projects using ad hoc management tools and processes. IT is regarded as a cost center.

✓ Stage 2: Standardized: Technologies and architectures are standardized, allowing for easier management and lower costs.

✓ Stage 3: Service Enabled: Technologies, architectures, and management are virtualized and rationalized across functional IT infrastructure expert teams.

✓ Stage 4: Hybrid Delivery: IT is offered as a service, with tiered service levels supported by service-centric inte-grated IT processes.

✓ Stage 5: Dynamic Configurable Services (most mature): IT is automated and reallocated based on business pro-cess needs. IT is a trusted partner for business innovation.

As you progress through the different stages — from assess-ing your readiness to implementation and beyond — HP offers consulting, training, and outsourcing services around HP Converged Infrastructure.



Converged Infrastructure Transformation Experience Workshop

The HP Converged Infrastructure Transformation Experience Workshop is a slide-free, simulated walkthrough that shows you the best ways to change the way you do business in a highly visual and interactive manner. The workshop takes you through a series of key topics that include today’s challenges, your converged infrastructure vision, more about shared resources and connectivity, and other key areas that include energy and sustainability, service management, and security.

This workshop is also a great way to gain stakeholder buy-in, to begin to build a next-generation infrastructure strategy that supports the evolving needs of the business, and to give trac-tion to your transformation projects, helping you to:

✓ Realize the scope, scale, and all critical success factors using a converged infrastructure architecture strategy for your next-generation infrastructure project.

✓ Identify quick wins that generate momentum while exploring the data center and IT infrastructure of the future.

✓ Gain stakeholder buy-in and give more traction to any existing IT or infrastructure convergence project including consolidation, virtualization, migration, and modernization.

✓ Leverage best practices in consolidation, virtualization, automation, and operations.

✓ Lay out your next steps in a road map.


Chapter 6: How HP Can Help 51

HP Connectivity Transformation Experience Workshop

The HP Connectivity Transformation Experience Workshop helps you figure out how to move your business from a rigid legacy network, which is overprovisioned and underutilized, to an agile network that responds dynamically to changing demands.

Your network infrastructure is a key enabler for your busi-ness. Modernizing and simplifying your network is fundamen-tal to transforming your IT infrastructure to fully leverage the network-enabled capabilities required for today’s workloads.

Kick-Start Your Cloud Journey with HP Cloud Professional Services

The choice to implement a cloud computing solution is dif-ferent for every organization. There are many considerations that need to be taken into account such as security, delivery models, applications, technologies, and cost in order to pro-vide the best return on investment. To help you, HP offers cloud professional services (see Figure 6-1) to advise, trans-form, and manage your cloud journeys and investments with an end-to-end lifecycle approach.

They also offer the HP Converged Cloud Workshop, which seeks to demystify and simplify the complex world of cloud with strategies and explanations of the possibilities, risks, and business implications. This workshop helps organiza-tions quickly get stakeholder buy-in and make decisions about cloud opportunities while getting everyone involved to the same level of understanding.



Figure 6-1: Professional Cloud Services Portfolio.

HP Consulting and Support Services for Converged Infrastructure

HP IT and facility experts can help you balance IT efficiency, innovation, and modernization as you reconcile the best con-vergence approach and position for your organization to meet market and operational pressures. An ideal data center of the future is a lot like the symphony orchestra: The harmony between business, IT, and facilities drives real convergence. To modernize your data center, it is equally important for IT and facilities to be synchronized and coordinated in their efforts to meet business needs.

Here are a few ways that HP can help you create a harmoni-ous data center:

✓ The Converged Infrastructure Transformation Experience Workshop is designed to explore and explain the fundamental converged infrastructure and cloud computing topics across your IT organization.

✓ The Converged Infrastructure Roadmap and Business Case Services features a suite of services to help you gradually transition your organization toward a converged


Chapter 6: How HP Can Help 53infrastructure. This service helps you define your strategic goals, success criteria, technical structure, implementa-tion approach, transformation roadmap, summary of cost estimates, and organizational and staffing requirements.

✓ Converged Infrastructure Design & Implementation Services help you design, implement, migrate, and integrate appropriate solutions built on converged infrastructure platforms and enabled by cloud-based or shared infrastructures.

✓ HP Support Services for Converged Infrastructure helps you understand the many components that need to work together to create a converged, virtualized, industry-standard IT environment. HP Proactive Care Service, as an example, is designed specifically to support these environments.

✓ HP Infrastructure Technology Outsourcing Services help you shift people costs from operations to more value-added tasks. They bring expertise, automation, and a delivery model to drive down costs. They provide flex-ible, adaptive technology and multiple sourcing options to help you respond to changing business demands. They enable compliance, security, and business continu-ity to reduce risk. And when you need to move quickly on new initiatives, they back you up with a team of experts and technology partnerships.

✓ HP Financial Services offers a full portfolio of financial services to help you move to a converged infrastructure safely and cost effectively. HP Financial Services has helped thousands of businesses quickly transition from existing technology, acquire new solutions, manage those solutions throughout their life cycle, and retire technology at the end of its useful life. For example, asset recovery services make it easy for you to safely dispose of old, unneeded IT equipment. Buy-back, leasing, and financing can help you expand the reach and impact of your technology budget. You’ll benefit from predictable monthly payments; plus, leasing helps minimize the risk associated with disposal of obsolete equipment. And with HP’s technology refresh options, the right equip-ment is within your reach when you need it.


HP Converged Infrastructure For Dummies, 2nd Edition 54HP offers a cohesive set of education and certification pro-grams for its customers and partners to help them make the most of the convergence journey:

✓ HP ExpertOne: The HP ExpertOne training and certifica-tion program helps your IT staff design, integrate, and manage a modern, converged data center optimized for cloud. This program is designed for individuals seeking to develop their skills for their own benefit or within their company. Whether you’re a technical veteran or a relative newcomer, whether your goal is skills update, career advancement, or career change, HP ExpertOne training and certification can help you build, transform, and validate the skills you need to reach goals for the data center and the cloud.

✓ HP AllianceOne: The HP AllianceOne Partner Program helps partners by supporting technical development and delivery of solutions across a wide array of spe-cializations including the cloud, business intelligence, management, security, hosting, storage management, networking, and more. ISVs, IHVs, OEMs, service provid-ers, and systems integrators work with HP to deliver solutions that meet real customer needs today and read-ily evolve to meet the challenges of tomorrow. The HP AllianceOne Program makes it easy by offering joint mar-keting, development tools, remote testing and technical benefits, partner support agents, and business planning tools.

✓ HP PartnerOne: HP PartnerOne is the award-winning flagship partner program through which HP manages various partner resources and offers initiatives for its reseller and distributor partners. HP PartnerOne includes levels of membership based on partners’ levels of partici-pation and engagement with HP.

The HP PartnerOne Program has become more consis-tent across all HP business units, with a more profitable compensation framework, a simpler membership struc-ture and streamlined certification requirements. As a result, channel partners are better equipped to predict earned rebates and more effectively chart a course to growing revenue, independent of any unique business model.


Chapter 6: How HP Can Help 55 ✓ HP ServiceOne: HP ServiceOne identifies HP Technology

Services partners. ServiceOne partners are well versed with your customers’ business environment and industry trends. They offer you expert advice on the right services for the job at hand, have ready access to HP’s global resources, and sell HP solutions through all phases of the IT solution lifecycle. This includes flexible services and support options.




Chapter 7

Nine Reasons You Should Embrace the Era of

ConvergenceIn This Chapter▶ Moving faster▶ Using technology wisely

T he era of convergence is here to stay. It allows you to operate more nimbly and reliably with fewer resources.

Who doesn’t like that?

Standing Still Is a MistakeThe world in which we live and do business is changing. Everyone is managing more data and more complexity than ever before. Companies are facing the speed of the competi-tion and responding to new opportunities the likes that the industry has never seen. IT is at the heart of all this. IT is what propels the business. Standing still is a recipe for failure because business speed continues to outpace IT. The gap between what business demands and traditional IT supply can deliver is widening. Current data centers are unsustainable.



Simplicity Accelerates IT ValueConvergence drives simplicity and simplicity is required of today’s new, modern data center. Simplicity drives IT speed and agility. Simplicity offers greater assurance that uptime targets are met without exception and SLAs can be main-tained. And simplicity drives broad efficiencies at all levels. If everything in a data center is simpler, more intelligent, more automated, and aligned to the application, everything is better: lower cost, less risk, and more resources available for innovating.

Make the Move to a Modern Data Center

Build a plan to align your IT with your applications and your business. In other words, deploy convergence solutions designed for the different kinds of application workloads that span your entire IT or data center ecosystem: massive scale or hyperscale applications (for instance, the corporate web-site), mainstream applications (for instance SharePoint, email, CRM, file, and print), and business-critical applications (for instance, ERP systems, patient records, financials, and credit card processing systems).

Turn Big Data into Big Profits, Big Savings, and Big Insight

The explosion of data that the world is creating has become overwhelming. The challenges involved in managing, storing, processing, and exploiting it are immense. On any given day, the world posts one billion pieces of content to Facebook, generates over 200 million tweets, and creates information using cameras, sensors, GPS enabled devices, and transaction systems. If big data analytics can’t be mined and extract value from the vast amounts of unstructured data produced daily by web and business users, those companies that can will quickly leapfrog those that can’t.


Chapter 7: Nine Reasons You Should Embrace the Era of Convergence 59

Meet SLAs and Minimize Downtime

A shared-services, application-aligned IT environment allows you to better meet SLAs and react in real-time to the changing needs of the business with a simplified disaster recovery pro-cess that reduces downtime to seconds.

Be Flexible, Secure, and Competitive

Only a flexible and agile IT infrastructure can meet the ever-broadening requirements to run businesses efficiently, effec-tively, and securely. These requirements drive new products and services, productivity enhancements, and new ways to approach customers and citizens. This type of flexibility and agility lets you redeploy resources at will to meet changes in market demand — the difference between missing a major opportunity or leaping ahead of the pack.

Redirect Wasted EnergyOn average, data centers generate 60 percent more power than they need. What if you could redirect wasted energy to the bottom line and save your business money? And what if you knew your actual power usage so you can deliver the most IT per watt and space?

Be Ready for What’s NextOut of extreme market conditions and changing business models, a modern data center with modern solutions will allow you to be ready to find a new way to serve your con-stituents and find new ways to win.



Turn Technology into an Advantage

Tomorrow’s leaders will be those organizations that capitalize on technology rather than become paralyzed by it. They will interact with customers, constituents, employees, and part-ners more quickly and with greater personalization.


Chapter 8

Five Ways to Converge with Ease

In This Chapter▶ Avoiding the rush▶ Looking deeper

A lthough a converged infrastructure will ultimately make your life easier, getting there can sometimes be a bit of a

challenge. Follow these key steps to get there with ease.

To Go Fast, First Go SlowTake the time to identify and prioritize your projects and then attack the top workloads first. Take the time to build out your road map, which will help profile the ideal projects and logical starting points.

Leverage Where You CanMake sure to define projects and leverage processes and best practices that either build on what you already have or evalu-ate alternatives for greenfield initiatives where converged sys-tems best serve the business. Get a quick win and build on it.



Don’t Forget Other OptionsThink about creating self-funding projects though financing options that allow transformation within your current budgets. Or take full advantage of proof of concept (POC) programs offered by your technology provider.

Be InformedTake advantage of assessment tools, digital media, and cus-tomer reference information to help you identify best-fit con-vergence opportunities and a training path to build expertise.

Look DeeperUse vendors with proven solutions that can help architect solutions you can change quickly and easily — adding new functionality as needed. Make sure today’s innovation doesn’t become tomorrow’s legacy.


Appendix A

HP Customer Case StudiesIn This Appendix▶ Priceline.com▶ Fortescue Metals Group▶ Commerz Direktservice GmbH▶ CenterBeam▶ Hostworks

A converged infrastructure allows you to align your appli-cations to the business at your own pace by making the

most efficient use of IT, facility, and staff resources. To illustrate this point, in this appendix we provide a few customer examples to highlight both customers that have gained convergence value quickly through turnkey converged systems or through smaller technology building block projects.

Priceline.comPriceline.com is one of the world’s largest online hotel reservation and travel services. Its IT team was faced with deploying more servers than it had power or room for. HP Converged Infrastructure technologies helped the company both avoid a costly data center expansion and gave it a modern technology platform to stay clearly aligned with its business strategy.

A few of the IT improvements that HP has estimated include:

✓ Doubling of their compute density while shrinking their infrastructure footprint by 65 percent

✓ Doubling storage utilization by eliminating stranded capacity


HP Converged Infrastructure For Dummies, 2nd Edition 64 ✓ The ability to increase their development environments

to engineers by two-fold, boosting innovation

✓ Enabling IT to move to a proactive (versus reactive)

Read the case study at http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=4AA3-9745ENW

Fortescue Metals GroupFortescue Metals Group is one of the world’s largest produc-ers of iron ore — supplying its products around Asia and Japan. Its old data center was full of siloed and piecemeal solutions. It needed its IT to accommodate massive growth, deliver solutions more quickly with simpler management, and to easily scale as the business grows. Fortescue Metals Group implemented the HP CloudSystem Matrix Infrastructure-as-a-Service private cloud solution at its corporate headquarters to meet these objectives.

HP estimates the following business benefits that allowed Fortescue Metals Group to:

✓ Predict their IT costs with a utility consumption model

✓ Provision servers 98 percent faster

✓ Provide greater business continuity and resiliency

✓ Decrease internal administration to focus on business growth

Read the case study at http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA4-1687ENW.pdf

Commerz Direktservice GmbHCommerz Direktservice GmbH in Duisburg, Germany, pro-vides call center services and problem resolution to custom-ers of Commerzbank AG, the second-largest bank in Germany. Following a merger, Commerz Direktservice provided its call center employees with virtual desktops to improve customer service and IT efficiency. It implemented HP Converged


http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=4AA3-9745ENW


http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA4-1687ENW.pdf

http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA4-1687ENW.pdf

Appendix A: HP Customer Case Studies 65Infrastructure technologies that included HP Storage, HP Blade servers and enclosures, and HP Virtual Connect as the basis for its cost-effective VDI solution.

HP estimates the following business benefits:

✓ 34,000 hours of productivity time reclaimed annually

✓ 50 percent reduction in cost to provide compute resources to employees

✓ 35 percent less power usage, further reducing costs

✓ 40 to 60 percent less IT staff time required to support call center operations

✓ 50 percent less rack space required to host VDI

✓ 30 percent reduction in help-desk tickets

Read the case study at http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=4AA3-8060ENW

CenterBeamCenterBeam delivers enterprise IT services to midsize businesses in the form of managed services, Software-as-a-Service, and Infrastructure-as-a-Service. Reliability and high customer satisfaction are critical. CenterBeam chose the HP VirtualSystem because of its flexibility. One of the big reasons the company moved to HP Converged Infrastructure was to enable shared services, gain agility, lower costs, and increase cloud service competitiveness.

HP estimates the following business benefits:

✓ Ten times more storage throughput than another vendor

✓ 65 percent reduction in the chief architect’s storage administration time so that he can focus on more valu-able projects

✓ HP Virtual Connect provides a 50 percent cost savings versus a competitor

✓ The solution helped CenterBeam exceed their customer satisfaction goals and their uptime goals of 99.995 percent




HP Converged Infrastructure For Dummies, 2nd Edition 66Read the case study at http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=4AA3-8489ENW

HostworksHostworks is an Australian market leader in complex webhost-ing, peak demand management, high transaction websites, and video streaming. It was looking for a computing solution that was able to scale up and down quickly to support the elastic computer requirements of its clients. It conducted an extensive evaluation of solutions based on track record, tech-nical fit to purpose, and commercial sizing of proposed solu-tion. It chose HP Converged Infrastructure solutions.

HP estimates the following IT improvements and business benefits:

✓ HP CloudSystem Matrix provides the platform for an agile, scalable computer facility

✓ VMware solutions running on HP’s Converged Infrastructure deliver a complete virtualization solution

✓ Simpler and speedier delivery of new services to Hostworks’ clients

✓ Hostworks is able to pass on genuine cost savings to clients

✓ Rapid provision of IT resources to meet with consumer demand

Read the case study at http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=4AA1-9725EEW.


http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=4AA1-9725EEW

http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=4AA1-9725EEW

http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=4AA3-8489ENW

http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=4AA3-8489ENW

Appendix B

HP ResourcesResources on Converged Infrastructure

✓ HP Converged Infrastructure: www.hp.com/ConvergedInfrastructure

✓ HP ConvergedSystems: www.hp.com/go/ConvergedSystems

✓ HP Virtualization Solutions: www.hp.com/go/ virtualization

✓ HP Converged Infrastructure Capability Model: www.hp.com/go/CI-CM

✓ HP Datacenter Networking: www.hp.com/networking/datacenter

✓ HP Converged Infrastructure Services: www.hp.com/go/CIservices

✓ HP Financial Services: www.hp.com/go/HPFS

Other Important Resources ✓ HP CloudSystem: www.hp.com/go/cloudsystem

✓ HP Virtualization Systems: www.hp.com/go/virtual system

✓ HP BladeSystem: www.hp.com/go/bladesystem

✓ HP Storage: www.hp.com/go/convergedstorage

✓ HP ProLiant: www.hp.com/go/proliant

✓ HP Moonshot: www.hp.com/go/moonshot


http://www.hp.com/ConvergedInfrastructure

http://www.hp.com/ConvergedInfrastructure

http://www.hp.com/go/ConvergedSystems

http://www.hp.com/go/ConvergedSystems

http://www.hp.com/go/CI-CM

http://www.hp.com/go/CI-CM

http://www.hp.com/networking/datacenter

http://www.hp.com/networking/datacenter

http://www.hp.com/go/cloudsystem

http://www.hp.com/go/virtualsystem

http://www.hp.com/go/virtualsystem

http://www.hp.com/go/bladesystem

http://www.hp.com/go/convergedstorage

http://www.hp.com/proliant

http://www.hp.com/go/virtualization

http://www.hp.com/go/virtualization

http://www.hp.com/go/CIservices

http://www.hp.com/go/CIservices

http://www.hp.com/go/HPFS

http://www.hp.com/go/moonshot

HP Converged Infrastructure For Dummies, 2nd Edition 68 ✓ HP Mission-critical: www.hp.com/go/integrity

✓ HP Networking: www.hp.com/networking

✓ HP Virtual Connect: www.hp.com/go/virtualconnect

✓ HP OneView: www.hp.com/go/oneview

✓ HP Insight Management: www.hp.com/go/insight

✓ HP Security and Risk Management: www.hp.com/ security

✓ HP ExpertOne: www.hp.com/expertone

✓ HP AllianceOne: www.hp.com/go/allianceone


http://www.hp.com/go/integrity

http://www.hp.com/networking

http://www.hp.com/go/virtualconnect

http://www.hp.com/go/insight

http://www.hp.com/security

http://www.hp.com/security

http://www.hp.com/expertone

http://www.hp.com/go/allianceone

http://www.hp.com/go/oneview
