HP to revolutionise the data centre

HP has officially introduced a new chapter in its enterprise offering, the industry’s first mission critical converged infrastructure.

Speaking at the Tech@Work conference HP Senior Vice President and General Manager for Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking, Wolfgang Wittmer revealed that converged infrastructure would see the data centre becoming more integrated and easy to roll out by providing a system which will enable storage, networking and processing to be installed into a single server box 

This marks a departure from current data centre layouts in which systems are stored separately. 

According to Jan Zodak, Senior Vice President for Enterprise Business and Managing Director for HP EMEA, converged infrastructure focuses on bringing previously separate components within the data centre together in a more unified manner. 

“Converged infrastructure is very different from how IT has been working over the last fifteen years. Previously everything existed in its own stacks such as storage or networking; we’re building new infrastructure that is bringing this all together,” commented Zodak.HP’s Superdome 2

In addition the announcement also brings significant upgrades for HP’s Superdome offering, the first upgrade to reach the platform in ten years. These include a new HP Blade Scale architecture which integrates networking, servers and storage. The Superdome is the primary processing unit for HP’s converged infrastructure architecture. 

Martin Fink, senior Vice President and General Manager of HP’s Business Critical Systems, said that the new Blade Scale Architecture, known as Superdome 2, will fit into a standard 19 inch cabinet and will feature a modular build design which will allow components to be quickly and easily replaced and fitted without downtime. 

“This reduces deployment times by 50%,” said Fink, who added that the Blade Scale Architecture will require “30% less power per core” and will bring “up to 100% application availability” platform. This will offer significant benefits in terms of the data centre’s power footprint and will reduce power load. 

According to David Donatelli, Executive Vice President, Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking, HP’s converged infrastructure business model will allow “users to manage from a new paradigm, one that is always online and looks at the system as a whole, not in parts”.

This, added Donatelli, allows for more functions to be integrated into a single server box which is easier to manage and deploy.

HP to revolutionise the data centre << Discussion