The rapidly-changing landscape and new business needs are driving revolutionary change in the server and data centre environment, which will evolve from being a series of components to an all-encompassing compute environment, says HP.
Andrew McNiven, HP South Africa industry standard servers Category manager, explains this new compute environment lies at the heart of the converged infrastructure.
"Compute encompasses networking, storage and servers that integrate to function as an advanced whole," he says. "In this dynamic new environment, applications and services can be turned on or off on a per user basis, workloads are optimised, there is exponential utilisation of data, and operational costs are brought down."
McNiven says this vision was behind the development of the game-changing HP Proliant Generation 8 series of servers two years ago, and the latest Generation 9 family launched this month.
"HP networking, storage and servers are now a tightly integrated unit, making HP the only vendor able to provide this entire integrated compute environment," he says.
With the whole now greater than the sum of its parts, HP enables faster time to value, with the ability to expand or shrink capacity, maximise available resources and control or even reduce costs.
"This converged approach began over five years ago, when various R&D divisions within HP started working together with the common goal of creating an environment that broke away from the linear approach to improving servers, storage and networking. Until then, servers, for example, were made incrementally faster until they reached a point where you had a trade-off against the heat produced. Then we increased the core count. R&D teams looked into the future and began a complete redesign. This was done in part based on analysis of over 100 000 customer calls around the world, relating to downtime or data loss. Every data centre and server challenge was considered as HP set to address common problems and deliver systems that met the changing needs of business. By integrating the ecosystem and re-imagining its components, HP set the scene for an entirely new environment in which the server is just part of a greater compute resource pool. Now, only HP delivers the right compute, for the right workload, at the right economics.
"In this new environment, we are seeing our own disparate R&D teams merging, overlapping, and collaborating more closely, " McNiven says. "Globally, we recently launched a new unit called 'Converged Systems', where ultimately we will see the sale of single compute solutions with no more piecemeal procurement," he says.
McNiven says HP envisages this future compute environment delivering significant cost savings in terms of capex, licensing, resources and power; as well as a competitive advantage by ramping up time to market.
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