HP Expands Converged Infrastructure Portfolio 

LAS VEGAS, Nev., June 2 -- HP today announced the expansion of its Converged Systems offerings including enhancements to the HP OneView 2.0 management platform, a new partnership with Arista Networks, and a series of new workload optimized reference architectures. These latest offerings are designed to give customers the flexibility and choice required to transform to a hybrid infrastructure while protecting their current IT investments.

According to IDC, more than 30 percent of customers are concerned with vendor lock-in or the inability to integrate new systems with current infrastructure and management tools. As organizations look to align their data centers with specific workload and application requirements, there’s a need for a converged infrastructure that allows customers to streamline storage, networking and compute assets for greater efficiency and business outcomes while protecting their current IT investments.

“HP is committed to helping our customers transform to a hybrid infrastructure that is built on open systems,” said Ric Lewis, senior vice president and general manager, HP Converged Data Center Infrastructure. “By expanding the reach of our HP OneView platform, we are giving our customers the choice they need to increase the agility and flexibility of their infrastructure in order to compete and grow in an increasingly fast paced business environment.”

Extend software defined infrastructure management with HP OneView 2.0

Management continues to play a critical role in the modern data center, but the complexity of tools and the manual processes have often slowed IT service roll-outs and resulted in operational inefficiency. HP OneView unifies processes, user interfaces (UI’s) and the application programming interfaces (APIs) across HP server, storage, and Virtual Connect networking devices. With HP OneView 2.0 customers can now save time and reduce costly errors by automating server change management. New server profile templates make it easy to define firmware and driver baselines as well as server, LAN and SAN settings in one place and consistently provision or update those settings multiple times. Additionally, new profile mobility makes it possible to migrate and recover of workloads across server platform types, configurations, and generations.

HP OneView 2.0 also delivers new automation, proactive monitoring and guidance for SANs so administrators can identify and resolve potential SAN issues before they impact the business. Automation for flash-optimized 3PAR StoreServ Storage now includes FCoE support in addition to Fiber Channel for those organizations that are looking to reduce cost through fabric consolidation. HP OneView now proactively identifies and alerts administrators to zoning errors, broken paths and orphaned volumes across the entire SAN and provides configuration reports with guidance to help make the SANs more efficient.

HP OneView users will now also be able to combine HP OneView’s intimate knowledge of physical infrastructure with virtual machine management from HP Virtualization Performance Viewer (vPV). This combination allows customers to proactively plan for new capacity requirements, easily understand the impact of maintenance operations, even mitigate configuration risk by detecting how virtualization clusters are striped across HP BladeSystem enclosures.

New partnership with Arista Networks delivers verified reference architectures

For customers desiring a choice of infrastructure to handle performance-intensive, virtualized and highly dynamic workloads, HP is announcing a new partnership with Arista to reap the benefits of an open converged infrastructure; delivering optimized solutions for today’s dynamic data center environments. The HP Converged Architecture with Arista enables verified solutions that combine Arista programmable network platforms for efficient networking. Designed to support private, public and hybrid cloud applications, these solutions provide a flexible and open choice across compute and storage, including all-flash solutions with HP 3PAR StoreServ. The open and flexible solutions deliver simplified provisioning and ongoing maintenance, via the application of Arista Extensible Operating System (EOS) and network programmable platforms, with HP OneView integration at its core, which helps reduce operational expense and minimizes the impact on IT staffs.

“The joint reference architectures from HP and Arista will deliver a dramatically simplified path to convergence and cloud-efficiency for our joint customers,” said Ed Chapman, vice president of business development and alliances, Arista Networks, Inc. “This will allow customers to rapidly realize the benefits of a converged infrastructure to accelerate their business and improve time to value while remaining flexible for future business needs.”

New workload-optimized reference architectures for cloud and mobility

Designing, building, and managing a conventional IT environment that can meet today’s dynamic business needs can be labor intensive and loaded with risk, complexity, and costs. The HP ConvergedSystem approach enables a high-velocity business model that delivers faster time-to-value, reduces costs and risks, and positions customers to move toward cloud-based models that increase competitive advantage. HP is introducing a series of new workload-optimized reference architectures to support cloud and mobility. This growing HP Verified Reference Architecture on HP ConvergedSystem 700 includes:

• Support for client virtualization workloads with HP Verified Reference Architecture for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) with Citrix XenDesktop on VMware vSphere
• Support for unified communication and collaboration workloads with HP Verified Reference Architecture for Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint 2013 and HP Verified Reference Architecture for Microsoft Lync 2013
• Support for business continuity in virtualized workloads with HP Verified Reference Architecture for Disaster Recovery using 3PAR StoreServ Storage, VMware vCenter SRM, and HP Verified Reference Architecture for HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage and VMware vSphere 6.0

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Source: HP