HP Converged Infrastructure: Reference Architecture Solution Block Design Guide
HP Converged Infrastructure delivers the Data Center of the Future
Table of contents
Introduction ... 3
The Business Value of Converged Infrastructure ... 5
The Opportunity ... 5
Getting Started ... 7
HP Converged Infrastructure Technology Foundation ... 8
Design Principles for the Data Center of the Future ... 8
Theory to Practice: Functional Description of HP Converged Infrastructure ... 9
Support for Industry Standards ... 19
Applying the HP Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model ... 19
HP Converged Infrastructure Reference Architectures ... 22
Overview ... 22
Generalized Reference Architecture ... 22
Virtual Resource Pools ... 23
FlexFabric ... 23
Matrix Operating Environment ... 24
ERP/CRM: SAP Business Suite 7, ERP 6.0 Use Case ... 28
Solution Architectural Principles ... 28
Solution Block Architectures ... 31
Specific HP Products Applied to the General Architecture ... 34
Messaging & Collaboration: Microsoft Exchange Use Case ... 39
Solution Architectural Principles ... 39
Solution Block Architectures ... 42
Specific HP Products Applied to the General Architecture ... 45
Virtualization: Generalized Use Case ... 47
Solution Architectural Principles ... 47
Solution Block Architectures ... 48
Specific HP Products Applied to the General Architecture ... 49
Cloud: Generalized Use Case ... 55
Definitions ... 55
Solution Architectural Principles ... 57
Solution Block Architectures ... 64
Glossary ... 69
For More Information ... 71
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1. The Transformation to HP Converged Infrastructure ... 3
Figure 2. Improving Productivity Through HP Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model ... 6
Figure 3. HP Converged Infrastructure functional block diagram ... 11
Figure 4. HP Data Center Smart Grid functional block diagram ... 14
Figure 5. HP FlexFabric functional block diagram ... 17
Figure 6. HP Converged Infrastructure Functional Block Diagram ... 23
Figure 7. HP Converged Infrastructure Reference Configuration ... 25
Figure 8. SAP Enterprise Resource Planning 6.0 – functional description ... 28
Figure 9. Core SAP architecture description ... 29
Figure 10. Resource Consumption and Scaling Capabilities for SAP OLTP Activity ... 30
Figure 11. High availability SAP system ... 31
Figure 12. Small SAP Configuration ... 34
Figure 13. Medium size SAP system ... 35
Figure 14. High availability SAP system ... 37
Figure 15. Exchange 2010 enterprise topology ... 40
Figure 16. Exchange 2010 enterprise topology ... 45
Figure 17. HP Converged Infrastructure: virtualization – conceptual view ... 49
Figure 18. HP Virtualization Reference Configuration: Small to Medium Enterprise Build ... 50
Figure 19. HP Virtualization Reference Configuration: Large Enterprise Build ... 51
Figure 20. HP Virtualization Reference Configuration: Multi-Data Center Build ... 53
Figure 21. HP Software Private/Public Cloud Functional Concept Reference Architecture ... 58
Figure 22. HP Data Center Automation Center ... 60
Figure 23. HP Operations Manager i ... 61
Figure 24. Lifecycle Automation with HP Operations Orchestration ... 63
Figure 25. Network Lifecycle Automation ... 64
Figure 26. HP Private Cloud Infrastructure detailed architecture for HP BladeSystem Matrix ... 65
Figure 27. HP Private Cloud Reference Architecture ... 66
Figure 28. Cloud Example Configuration ... 68
LIST OF TABLES Table 1. HP Converged Infrastructure Elements... 10
Table 2. Network requirements ... 16
Table 3. Scope and Stages of HP Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model ... 19
Table 4. Scoping and mapping of stages of maturity to data center capability and HP products .. 20
Table 5. CI MM stage and representative HP products ... 21
Table 6. Elements of the HP Converged Infrastructure Reference Architecture ... 26
Table 7. Service Definition Criteria for an SAP System ... 32
Table 8. High availability SAP system ... 33
Table 9. Tiers of service ... 41
Table 10. Exchange 2010 server role resource requirements... 43
Table 11. Common HP Operations Orchestration usage scenarios ... 62
Revision History
Version. No. Date Comments
1.0 November 2007 HP Solution Blocks
2.0 September 2010 HP Converged Infrastructure
Introduction
Information Technology as a “service” has moved from concept to reality. Early adopters have
already deployed major solutions, and it has become a standard objective for mainstream Information Technology (IT) architects and planners. HP has adopted the term “Converged Infrastructure” to describe how HP products and services can address this approach. This Reference Architecture guide provides a business and technical view of the adoption process.
Today’s IT stakes are larger than applications and platforms. They span the data center, from capacity to technology, processes, people, and governance. HP Converged Infrastructure opens the door to new approaches, and can enable IT management to defer or avoid costly data center expansions. For example:
• Simplification: Collapse siloed, hierarchical, point to point infrastructure into an easily managed, energy-efficient, and re-usable set of resources.
• Enabling growth: Efficiently deploy new applications and services, with optimum utilization across servers, storage, networking, and power.
• On-demand delivery: Deliver applications and services through a common framework that can leverage on-premise, private cloud, and off-premise resources.
• Employee productivity: Move human capital from operations to innovation by increasing automation of application, infrastructure, and facility management.
HP Converged Infrastructure enables organizations to achieve these goals while getting ahead of the growth curve and the cost curve. Figure 1 illustrates how HP Converged Infrastructure transforms the traditional data center into a unified, flexible resource for business.
Figure 1. The Transformation to HP Converged Infrastructure
Poorly Integrated Power Cooling Infrastructure
Today’s Datacenter HP Converged Infrastructure
Data Center of the Future
Optimized Power Cooling Infrastructure
Hierarchical Network
Virtual Resource
Pool
Orchestrated Automated Provisioning Flat Network 1-1 Cabling
Discrete Distributed Resources
Storage Pool
Logical Switch
One-off Provisioning Discrete
Switches
Server Pool
Integrated Service Management and
Security
Attaining this goal is achievable today, with this guide as the roadmap. Configurations based on HP BladeSystem c-Class, Superdome 2, HP StorageWorks, and HP Intelligent Resilient Framework provide a flat network and resource pool suitable for the enterprise. In the section “Converged Infrastructure Reference Architectures” these building blocks and others are assembled to address key enterprise workloads. This HP Converged Infrastructure architecture can be deployed with the
approach taken by HP IT internally, and large HP customers:
1. Start from existing investments, whether from HP or others.
2. Extend those investments with standards-based components and building blocks from HP that have already been designed to support a “single pane of glass” management philosophy.
3. Pool those resources for allocation “as needed, when needed” adjusting to business requirements.
4. Converge the infrastructure while sticking to your priorities. HP already works with major vendors to verify that their application, operating system, virtualization and other products can be
managed and optimized.
This sequence of this guide addresses the information needed by key IT stakeholders across the project lifecycle; starting with planning, then building, and finally running infrastructure.
“The Business Value of Converged Infrastructure” provides senior managers and planners with a look at how HP Converged Infrastructure solves real business problems today. It is also useful to IT
management and staff, as it frames the business objectives that technology must address.
“HP Converged Infrastructure Technology Foundation” describes the core elements and architectural principles. It provides architects and designers with functional descriptions as well as a discussion of the HP Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model, and how the model accelerates IT results.
“HP Converged Infrastructure Reference Architectures” provides real instances of HP Converged Infrastructure. It starts with the “core” Converged Infrastructure architecture, and then builds with functional architecture, product mappings, and deployable, application-specific configurations.
Deployment and operations specialists can use it as their initial reference when considering solution alternatives for upgrading or transforming data center capabilities.
Along with this comprehensive Converged Infrastructure model, HP offers tools, services, and workshops to support well-informed decisions. For example:
• The HP Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model can help you assess the current and desired future state of your data center infrastructure, people, processes and governance. The result is a
customized, action-oriented, high-level roadmap for structured improvement.
• Data Center Transformation workshops can help define projects in the areas of consolidation, energy & space efficiency, automation, and business continuity & availability.
• HP Application Modernization solutions can help visualize legacy application evolution. This creates opportunities for infrastructure renewal and determines the right legacy application transformation strategy for the business.
• Proven Private Cloud and Enterprise Services that can help design, build, manage, and run the converged infrastructure.
• HP Financial Services are available to transition from existing technology, acquire new solutions, manage those solutions through the lifecycle, and then retire technology. HP Financial Services can also show how HP Converged Infrastructure can reduce capital expenses.
Regardless of where an organization is in this process, HP Converged Infrastructure can be delivered as needed and at the required pace. It provides a solid foundation for real IT solutions, and an IT approach that extends the life of the data center, while enhancing agility and business value. Please consult your HP specialist or HP certified partner for assistance on your specific project.
The Business Value of Converged Infrastructure
The Opportunity
Infrastructure convergence has emerged as possibly the most important trend in decades – creating a mass ripple effect that has brought our industry to a major inflection point in how we approach IT. In today’s business landscape, everything is “accelerated” and “exponential” – across users,
competitors, internal organizations, investors, and on and on. The value of IT or Data Center convergence has far reaching benefits across all these communities.
Your business customers expect IT costs and resources to be in-line with the business cost envelope while ensuring tighter compliance amidst tougher regulations. They also demand rapid IT results – not weeks or months, but days, hours, or even minutes. And they want all this with functionality, quality and security, and the option to change/add resources on demand.
Taken together, these incremental investments are forcing hard customer decisions on how to extend the life of the data center. The cost of any individual application pales against the cost of moving or expanding a data center. HP Converged Infrastructure delivers technical innovation by collapsing infrastructure and related costs and potentially avoiding or deferring on-premise facility investments.
Restructuring around services
In addition to addressing issues in the data center itself, IT needs to be able to freely and cost- effectively innovate for business advantage. It’s no longer about being an efficient world-class IT organization, rather about being a true partner in the business – responding quickly to business demands and bringing in new innovation for growth. IT becomes a service broker, building a service delivery channel that can match SLAs and the choice of services to the desired business outcomes for each customer.
Unfortunately, change does not usually happen easily. IT Sprawl is real: resources that are tangled up in legacy applications and architecture silos that demand dedicated infrastructure. Add in the new wave of applications – social networking, mobility, media, etc. - yet another set of unique and manually provisioned applications.
Because of IT sprawl, most organizations are spending upwards of 70% of the IT budget on operational costs while business innovation is throttled down to 30%. Even worse, about half of this 30% is allocated to application upgrade cycles. That leaves only about 15% of the budget for true innovation.
The bottom line: It has never been more strategic or critical to rethink and transform the data center.
Innovation is an imperative for business and IT to survive and thrive.
Convergence delivers a services-oriented infrastructure so that IT organizations can reallocate staff resources from operations to innovation. HP Converged Infrastructure gives you rapid provisioning and flexible resourcing to match IT supply with fluctuating demand. It frees-up funds trapped in operations to reduce the burden of legacy and mission critical systems and reclaims the funds for innovation. Adopting the HP Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model as a roadmap to renewing data center operational skills can provide a huge execution advantage, as well as lead to
improvements that extend the life of the data center. It covers a broad range of capabilities, as shown below.
Figure 2. Improving Productivity Through HP Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model
• Automatic management and reallocation of a converged infrastructure to support services based on business process needs
• IT becomes a trusted business innovation partner
• Infrastructure offered as a service
• Tiered service levels, supported by service-centric integrated IT processes
• Rationalized technologies, architecture, management tools and processes
• Cross functional IT infrastructure expert teams
• Standard technologies, architectures, management tools and processes
• Technology-based
• Project-based decisions and dedicated infrastructure
• Ad Hoc management tools and processes
• Technology-based IT organization / cost center managed to budget
CI MM - Stages of Maturity
Stage 1:
Compartmentalized, Legacy Stage 4:
Automated Service Oriented Stage 5:
Adaptively sourced Infrastructure
Stage 2:
Standardized Stage 3:
Optimized
Maturity
Definitions
Where the savings come from
HP Converged Infrastructure can help businesses overcome the confines of IT sprawl and shift resources from operations to innovation. HP Converged Infrastructure delivers the data center of the future, today. The foundation technologies described later in this guide have all been built with convergence in mind. They all reflect industry standards, leadership intellectual property, openness, and of course, customer choice. These result in fundamentally lower costs, and a lot less infrastructure.
Here a few of the many examples of how HP solutions can simplify your data center and deliver the cost savings with which to fund innovation:
• HP Intelligent Resilient Framework merges standalone switches to form a flat, unified fabric, eliminating hops and packets by the billions.
• HP Virtual Connect FlexFabric reduces server edge infrastructure by 95%. Virtualized I/O reduces the need for large numbers of high-bandwidth connections while providing better performance.
• HP Integrity servers provide 2-1 core count consolidation over older servers, and each core can support up to 20 virtual machines. Racks of test and development servers simply disappear.
• HP Insight Dynamics lets you do drag and drop provisioning of complex, multi-tier applications. Cut your provisioning time and errors by a factor of 10.
• HP Intelligent Power Distribution reports the power you actually use, device by device. Dynamic Power Capping can reduce infrastructure power cost per server up to 69%.
With HP Converged Infrastructure, you get a unified, service-ready, and shared infrastructure that can dynamically orchestrate and provision server, storage, and networking efficiently. As resources are allocated for specific workloads, they are also rapidly scalable and optimized for energy-efficiency, high availability and utilization. The bottom line is extending the life of the data center. This means delivering more business value, while using less infrastructure, and power, and investing more in innovation instead of operations.
Getting Started
The next sections will dive deeper into HP Converged Infrastructure technology, a “core” framework for using these technologies, and several solution use cases built upon this foundation. There are two broad scenarios for taking advantage of HP Converged Infrastructure.
• A transformational approach that establishes a platform for consolidation, greenfield, or private cloud initiatives. HP BladeSystem Matrix supports HP-UX, Linux and Windows, and is an excellent solution for these types of projects. It provides a ready-to-go converged infrastructure that is quickly deployable to support your preferred hypervisors, operating systems, applications, and workloads.
• A building block approach that is based on standards. This can gain ground on IT sprawl with servers, storage, network, management designed for convergence and greater investment protection.
• For both of these approaches, HP offers preconfigured solutions such as HP BladeSystem Matrix, including HP BladeSystem Matrix with HP-UX, and HP Performance Optimized Datacenter (HP POD). This innovative solution is a fully equipped datacenter in a container, ready for your applications.
Consider how the HP Converged Infrastructure strategy and portfolio can meet and exceed your next set of objectives and requirements. Take advantage of these proven tactics for generating immediate returns, while laying a solid foundation for the future:
• Identify the root cause of innovation gridlock and prioritize your projects that attack the top opportunities first.
• Define projects that either build upon what you already have or evaluate alternatives for greenfield initiatives where the shared service model best serves the business.
• Possibly create self-funding projects though financing options that allow transformation within your current budgets.
• Apply the Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model assessment tools to help you identify ‘best fit’
convergence starter opportunities and a training path to build expertise.
• Begin to build-out your shared services roadmap. This also could help profile the ideal projects and logical starting points.
• Use vendors that can help architect solutions that can be changed quickly and easily – adding new functionality as needed. This validates today’s innovation doesn’t become tomorrow’s legacy.
Read on to better understand the new tools you can apply – or call your HP sales representative or authorized reseller to arrange a planning workshop.
HP Converged Infrastructure Technology Foundation
This section covers the basic design architecture of the converged infrastructure data center, based on HP developed models and available HP and partner technologies. This is followed by a description of the HP Converged Infrastructure approach. The functional shared service capabilities of HP
Converged Infrastructure provide the foundation for architecting and evolving data center infrastructure based on best practices developed from decades of successful data center transformation and shared service deployments implemented by HP professionals.
Design Principles for the Data Center of the Future
The solution to IT sprawl is to break down the technology silos and bring all compute, storage, and networking resources together as a common pool. Resources can then be dynamically provisioned and shared by many applications and managed as a service. This approach brings together management tools, policies, and processes so that resources and applications are managed in a holistic, integrated manner. It also brings together power and cooling management capabilities so systems and facilities work together to extend the life of the data center.
The HP Converged Infrastructure has five overarching design principles that are important to IT and together enable the data center of the future. The infrastructure must be virtualized, resilient, orchestrated, open, and modular. Each is described briefly below and then detailed through the remainder of this section.
Virtualized
HP Converged Infrastructure benefits from the virtualization of resources: compute, storage,
networking, applications, and operating systems. Virtualization provides an abstraction layer between the physical and the logical, making it easier and faster to reallocate resources to match the changing performance, throughput, and capacity needs of individual applications. This end-to-end virtualization improves IT flexibility and response to business requests, improving business speed and agility.
Virtualization covers all key aspects of the infrastructure. This includes client desktops, networking, servers, memory, and storage.
Specific aspects of virtualization include:
• Compute resources. Pools of modular server resources which can be virtualized using technologies such as VMware™ vSphere™, Microsoft™ Hyper-V™, and HP Integrity Virtual Machines.
• Storage resources. Storage that is virtualized at the array, network, and file system level enables higher utilization of existing capacity, eliminates stranded capacity, enables tiering which lowers costs for new capacity, and provides a non-disruptive way to respond to data growth.
• Network resources. Virtualized networks provide the ability to quickly provision service-specific classification and prioritization based on the physical and virtual workloads from the entrance point of the physical or virtual server edge extended throughout the network fabric to ensure consistent application end-user experience. This approach enables simplified, consistent service delivery and improved business agility. Virtualized configuration and management of the extended network to increase performance through higher utilization. Reduce the cost of network operations by reducing cabling-related provisioning costs and downtime.
Resilient
HP Converged Infrastructure integrates fault tolerant mission-critical technologies and high availability policies. Because diverse applications share virtualized resource pools, the infrastructure must have an operating environment that automates high-availability policies to meet SLAs and provides the right level of availability for each business application.
Security is also a key enabler of resiliency; the infrastructure must support policy-based security models, continuous intrusion prevention, and automated updating of security solutions. It must ensure the integrity and availability of applications, systems, and data with security solutions that are unified across physical and virtual server domains. This is essential to ensure threats can be blocked before they can proliferate over the network.
Resiliency is derived from the compute, storage and network resources and processes that provide failover, high availability and disaster recovery based on business requirements.
Orchestrated
HP Converged Infrastructure orchestrates the requests of the applications, data, and infrastructure, defining the policies and service levels through automated workflows, provisioning, and change management. Orchestration provides 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 and facilities, including billing, metering, and chargeback for consumption.
For example, orchestration should reduce the time and effort for deploying multiple instances of a single application. In addition, 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 individual piece of the physical stack.
Open
HP Converged Infrastructure is based on industry standard technologies. This ensures customers can leverage existing investments as part of the consolidation and convergence process. Industry standards enable customers to adopt new technologies incrementally and at their own pace, and provide the technology openness they require to incorporate heterogeneous infrastructure.
Modular
HP Converged Infrastructure is built on modular design principles based on open standards, allowing for interoperability. The modular approach allows IT to integrate new technologies with existing investments, and provides infrastructure extensibility for the future.
The modular approach should remain open, so that special-purpose or existing infrastructure investments from multiple vendors can be managed under a common umbrella, and share resources with other elements of the pool.
Theory to Practice: Functional Description of HP Converged Infrastructure
HP Converged Infrastructure embodies the design criteria outlined above and integrates a rich set of technologies into a seamless, standards-based infrastructure. This approach enables IT organizations to deploy applications with minimal constraints on “best of breed” infrastructure technologies. The HP Converged Infrastructure architecture stack is illustrated below and includes three categories of products:
• Core products that is essential to delivery of Converged Infrastructure services. These products provide the glue which enables rapid, virtualized, application deployment.
• Supporting products that can be deployed in standalone configurations. These products have been designed to take full advantage of shared service capabilities.
• Complementary products such as those from third party providers. HP Converged Infrastructure provides solid interoperability with, and management of, complementary products.
Table 1. HP Converged Infrastructure Elements Architecture
Pillar Core
Element Supporting
Element Complementary Element
Virtual Resource Pools:
Compute
• HP BladeSystem c-Class
• HP BladeSystem Matrix (x86 and Integrity)
• HP ProLiant blades
• HP Integrity blades
• HP Superdome 2
• HP ProLiant servers
• HP NonStop Integrity BladeSystem
• Windows
• Linux
• HP-UX
• OpenVMS
• NonStop
Virtual Resource Pools:
Storage
• HP SAN storage: P4000, EVA, XP
• HP NAS storage: X9000
• HP SAN Virtualization Services Platform (SVSP)
• HP EVA Cluster
• HP StoreOnce deduplication
• HP Storage Essentials
• HP Storage Networking
Third party storage
Data Center Smart Grid: Power management
• HP Insight Control
• Data Center Environmental Edge
• Intelligent Power Discovery
• iLO3 support
• Sea of sensors
Third party facility management systems
FlexFabric: Networking • HP Virtual Connect
• A-series switches
• Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager
• HP TippingPoint Network Security solutions
Third party networking products
Matrix Operating Environment:
Management Orchestration
• HP Insight Dynamics
• Insight Dynamics – VSE
• HP Insight Control
• HP Operations Orchestration
• HP Systems Insight Manager
• VMware
• Microsoft Hyper-V
• Citrix …
The following figure illustrates how the four pillars of HP Converged Infrastructure map to the solution elements listed above in the context of a functional block diagram.
Figure 3. HP Converged Infrastructure functional block diagram
Matrix Operating Environment
• Insight Dynamics
• Insight Control
• SIM Virtual Resource Pools
• ProLiant servers
• Integrity servers
• BladeSystem
• EVA & SVSP
• P4000
• X9000
Orchestration
Compute &
Storage Resources
Hypervisor
Converged Networking
OS App
Power & Capacity Mgmt FlexFabric
• Virtual Connect [Flex-10]
• Intelligent Resilient Framewk
• TippingPoint Security
Data Center Smart Grid
•Thermal Logic
•Insight Control
•Environmental Edge
The sections that follow detail functional capability, product mappings and advantages for shared services provided for each of the functional areas.
Resource Supply: HP Virtual Resource Pools
HP Virtual Resource Pools are derived from common modular infrastructure that enables the creation of shared capacity that can be combined, divided, and repurposed to match application demand more effectively. Using HP Converged Infrastructure, IT organizations can support business users through a common pool of virtualized resources that can are configured “on the fly” for different needs: e.g. core business, shared services, mission critical, cloud, and high-performance computing (HPC) applications. HP Virtual Resource Pools leverage the innovative capabilities of servers, storage, mission-critical systems, and scale-out technologies across the HP ProLiant, Integrity, Integrity NonStop, and StorageWorks portfolios. The resources can be provisioned to support third party virtualization environments such as VMware and Microsoft, as well as HP solutions such as HP Integrity Virtual Machines.
Business Challenge
While server virtualization has become widely adopted, there is still much efficiency to be gained by applying the lessons learned to other areas of the physical infrastructure. In addition, the adoption of virtual machine technology has begun to lead to ‘Virtual IT Sprawl’ where machine images are created indiscriminately and without a clear resource strategy.
Some specific server and storage challenges include:
• Improve time to deployment and reduce wasted capacity.
• Adhere to Service Level Agreement metrics such as response time, maintenance windows, and application availability.
• Address power and cooling challenges as well as substantial facilities costs.
• Reduce capital and operational costs.
• Reduce the impact of data growth on storage investment for traditional and emerging data types.
• Improve business continuity and availability for critical applications.
• Simplify the deployment of storage for business applications.
• Reduce wasted capacity and isolated, independent data repositories.
Considerations and best practices:
There are many best practices to consider when moving from isolated islands of compute and storage towards virtual pools of capacity. When evaluating server virtualization it is important to:
• Make compute resources available as either virtual or physical resources.
• Provide a mix of resources to maximize deployment efficiency AND meet business needs.
• Leverage hypervisors to distribute workloads efficiently and rapidly.
• Apply templates to ensure consistent deployment images for replicated workloads.
Some additional considerations apply when eliminating stranded storage capacity:
• Utilize shared storage such as Network Attached Storage (NAS) or Storage Area Network (SAN) unless application specific requirements indicate otherwise.
• Consider storage virtualization technologies to improve utilization and enable granular “pay as you grow” investments that are non-disruptive.
• Leverage management tools to automate storage provisioning, reduce operational costs, and provide storage provisioning consistency.
• Tier storage to improve ROI of storage investments.
HP Converged Infrastructure Solution
HP provides a comprehensive portfolio of server resources that leverage a range of hypervisor and operating system technologies.
• HP ProLiant servers include blade and rack-mount 2, 4 and 8-socket x86 servers These support all major commercial hypervisor products, Microsoft Windows, and major commercial Linux
distributions.
• HP Integrity servers provide for a mission-critical Converged Infrastructure and include blade and rack mount form factors. HP Integrity server blades with HP-UX combine 2, 4, and 8 socket systems with Blade Link technology. HP Integrity Superdome 2 with HP-UX provide scale as you grow flexibly up to 64 processors. HP Integrity NonStop BladeSystem includes fault-tolerant NonStop software with the scalability expected in NonStop solutions.
• The Integrity and ProLiant server blades share the same BladeSystem c-Class family of enclosures.
HP StorageWorks products deliver a range of storage solutions for midrange, enterprise, and mission- critical needs, and also provide strong integration with existing heterogeneous storage products. They provide a rich storage resource pool for HP Converged Infrastructure, such as these examples:
• HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) and XP disk arrays deliver virtualized Fibre Channel storage with highly efficient management tools.
• HP StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform (SVSP) delivers network-based virtualized storage and provides a mechanism to combine HP and 3rd party storage into a single virtual pool.
• HP StorageWorks P4000 products deliver virtualized iSCSI storage using a clustered scale-out architecture for improved reliability and non-disruptive growth.
• HP StorageWorks X9000 delivers scale-out NAS file system virtualization and supports extremely large file namespaces exceeding 16 petabytes for large content depots.
Power and Facilities Management: HP Data Center Smart Grid
A data center is a highly complex ecosystem filled with IT hardware and racks, connected by miles of wires and cables, with complex relationships between hardware and software. It intersects with another complex system, the data center facility itself, which delivers power, cooling and floor space for IT. For reliability and availability, both infrastructure and the facility are usually over-provisioned.
A fixed energy and cooling buffer is usually allotted to make sure that critical peaks of IT usage do not result in IT meltdowns. Plus, power and cooling is “fixed,” usually supplying a constant amount to IT—no matter the data center status or workload.
Business Challenge
In most ways, power usage in current data centers is provisioned in an identical manner to compute and storage: sized for peak, and typically largely underutilized. It is also difficult to track and manage, leading to accidental shutdowns of critical resources.
Over-provisioning leads to several major issues:
• Power distribution infrastructure costs are increased.
• Data centers can be rated as out of capacity well before actual physical limits are reached.
• Cooling is over-delivered, increasing cooling plant and utility costs.
Individual infrastructure components also contribute to excess power usage:
• Inefficient power supplies.
• Limited control over fans or power to processors, memory, storage, and network devices.
Considerations and best practices
• Map and monitor power consumption to rack capacity.
• Manage power consumption to reflect changing infrastructure power needs.
• Use a TCO model to understand the cost of powering and cooling of servers, both existing and future systems.
• Map, monitor and manage facility cooling to match infrastructure cooling needs.
• When planning server deployments, don’t use device power consumption estimates. Understand actual usage where possible, which is not always reflected in nameplate specifications. HP
equipment will tell you exactly how much power is being consumed and lets you control power use accordingly.
• Tightly manage power delivery configurations to eliminate errors during configuration changes.
• Understand data center thermal trends and airflow.
• Deploy shutdown procedures that prioritize availability for mission-critical applications. Have a plan for infrastructure failure and maintenance planning.
HP Converged Infrastructure Solution
HP Data Center Smart Grid integrates environmental management, facilities management, and system management. It creates an intelligent, energy-aware environment across the infrastructure and
facilities to optimize and adapt energy usage, to reclaim facility capacity, and to reduce energy costs. HP Data Center Smart Grid collects and communicates thousands of power and cooling measurements across systems and facilities in real time, giving your organization greater insight and control over energy use. This lets you support business growth by deploying more infrastructure within the same data center footprint, hosting more applications and making more effective use of your existing capacity and capital investments.
HP Data Center SMART GRID includes sensors, integrated controls, and planning and management tools at the chassis, rack and facility level. Key products and capabilities are shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4. HP Data Center Smart Grid functional block diagram
6 POWER
MANAGEMENT
Facility
HP Environmental Edge Wireless sensor grid Cooling policy management Integration with building
systems Rack
Rack
Power and Cooling Management Rack
Chassis
Chassis I-PDU
HP Thermal Logic Dynamic Power Capping Common Slot Power Supply Sea of Sensors
Thermal Logic Usage Reporting HP Insight Control Intelligent Power Discovery Data Center Power Control Insight Control Power Mgmt ANALYSIS &
PLANNING
Facility-Level Records database Analysis and reporting Cooling optimization
Resource Pool - Level HP Smart Solver HP Capacity Advisor
Facility–level capabilities
HP Data Center Environmental Edge deploys a set of sensors within the data center to establish demand requirements. With instant, accurate measurements, you have the hard data you need to optimize and control your power and cooling efficiency. HP Environmental Edge integrates with leading facility management software to provide closed-loop management of cooling resources.
Data Center–level capabilities
HP Insight Control provides the umbrella software management facility. Products such as Data Center Power Control work within the framework of HP Insight Control to provide administrators with information on power consumption that can be mapped to application demand.
Data Center Power Control is a feature of HP Insight Control power management software. It allows data center administrators to define rules to handle power and cooling emergencies.
Intelligent Power Discovery (IPD) maps and reports power requirements for each data center device, thus providing the power management ‘bridge’ between data center and IT operations. IPD allows data center operations to tune cooling capability and manage the power grid.
Key capabilities include:
• Associate servers to power circuits & improve power planning with precision that’s calibrated to real-time power demands, not estimates.
• Show available power capacity to easily identify where to deploy new servers, and identify electrical and thermal overloads so you know which servers are at risk.
• Integration with reporting tools enables administrators to visualize the data center thermal status, locate hotspots and identify at-risk services.
• Find outlets that are providing power but are not correctly configured & identify erroneous data between the actual power state and manually entered or imported data.
Device–level capabilities
HP Thermal Logic technology is integrated with current ProLiant and Integrity server products, and will be incorporated into future releases of StorageWorks and HP Networking products. By reducing power usage on the compute infrastructure side, equivalent power can also be saved on the cooling side.
The HP Sea of Sensors is a collection of 32 smart sensors embedded at the device level to track thermal activity and enable automated power management. The sensors dynamically adjust system components such as fans, memory and processing to optimize system cooling and increase efficiency.
HP Power Capping and HP Dynamic Power Capping are implemented in system hardware and firmware and are therefore not dependent on the operating system or applications. Using the power monitoring and control mechanisms built into ProLiant servers, power capping is specifically designed to allow an administrator to limit, or cap, the power consumption of a server or group of servers. This provides increased flexibility in data center planning by allowing the administrator to manage parameters that are directly influenced by server power consumption. Power capping also allows the administrator to control server power consumption in emergency situations such as the loss of primary AC power.
HP Common Slot Power Supply gives customers the option to easily customize servers with the optimal power supply. By providing three off-the-shelf power supplies with different capacities, it enables customers to easily make changes at the chassis level to meet their changing resource needs.
Converged Network: HP FlexFabric
HP FlexFabric is a highly scalable data center fabric architecture and a technology layer in the HP Converged Infrastructure. This open architecture uses industry standards to provide high performance, secure, multiprotocol connectivity to storage and server resources using a single network fabric and wire-once simplicity.
FlexFabric combines intelligence at the server edge with an advanced orchestration and management layer to enable virtualization-aware networking, predictable performance, and rapid, secure,
business-driven provisioning of data center to avoid problems of latency and network contention. The key products that deliver FlexFabric are positioned in a typical networking environment in Figure 5.
Capabilities of specific products and enhancements from standard network hierarchies are discussed below.
Business Challenge
• Faster time to application deployment.
• Reduce complexity and lower network-related costs associated with delivery of applications.
• Ensure network security.
• Ensure performance and availability as workload is scaled.
Considerations and best practices
• Converge and virtualize storage and server edge network connectivity.
• Extend the size of the available network resource pool by implementing a ‘flat’ network design using large scale layer 2 domains.
• Implement two-tier network design and switch virtualization technologies (e.g. Intelligent Resilient Framework – IRF) to improve performance, reduce latency, and reduce management complexity.
• Optimize network resource to make effective use of high-throughput technologies.
• Reduce the requirements for point to point wiring to support individual workloads and to reduce provisioning errors.
• Deliver threat management that unifies security for virtual and physical workloads.
• Provide support for multiple protocols (Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet, iSCSI, SAS) to simplify network infrastructure.
• Dynamic bandwidth allocation on the fly.
The standard services provided by the network are illustrated in Table 2.
Table 2. Network requirements
Network Service Requirement
WAN Connectivity Layer Routing to Global MPLS WAN, ISP’s
Application Optimization Protocol Optimization of Selected Applications Data Center Core Routing Layer Routing to individual Cells and adjacent Data Center’s
Intrusion Prevention Systems Intrusion Prevention for PCI Applications, network uptime and data protection Distribution Layer Resilient multi-path L2/L3 fabric (TRILL/VPLS/IRF)
Embedded Security Physical and Virtual Firewall and IPS Application Load Balancing Application specific Load balancing services Server Edge
Virtualization/Switching Edge connectivity for Servers and Storage
Enterprise Instrumentation sFlow, consistent policy deployment throughout physical and virtual network fabric, detailed troubleshooting facilities embedded in the network fabric
I/O Consolidation FCoE, DCB, iSCSI
HP Converged Infrastructure Solution
HP FlexFabric provides a portfolio of solutions that support traditional 3-tier and advanced, simplified 2-tier network topologies. Mapping of the previous table to HP 2-tier networking model is shown in below.
Figure 5. HP FlexFabric functional block diagram
Network Management
Network Storage Interconnect Server Edge
Servers
Network Security Backbone
Intelligent Management Center (IMC) HP Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager
HP TippingPoint
Network Backbone
• HP A6600/A8800
• HP A12500 Network Interconnect
• HP A9500
• HP A12500 Network Server Edge
• HP A5820
• HP Virtual Connect FlexFabric/Flex-10
The specific network capabilities for this configuration are described below.
• Virtualize configuration and management of multiple network switch devices to enable simplified network design and extend network scale/utilization using Intelligent Resilient Framework (IRF) technology on HP A-series network switches.
• Virtualize and enable per application, priority-based bandwidth control and wire-once connectivity migration with Virtual Connect Flex-10 & Virtual Connect FlexFabric for HP BladeSystem.
• Implement highly-scalable core and aggregation switching platforms.
• Implement consolidated, single-pane-of-glass, multi-vendor, multi-site network resource management using HP Intelligent Management Center (IMC)/ HP Network Management Console for automation and orchestration.
Future Enhancements
HP FlexFabric utilizes the latest industry standards, including higher speed Ethernet links, Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregation (VEPA), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE). The CEE standard enables Ethernet to deliver a “lossless” transport technology with congestion management and flow control features needed in storage environments. HP is
championing many of these standards in the IEEE and other organizations in order to give its customers a data center fabric that protects their technology investments. The use of proprietary approaches can cause organizational disruption and wholesale equipment replacement or lock-in during infrastructure extensions or upgrades.
Provisioning and Management: Matrix Operating Environment
Provisioning and management for HP Converged Infrastructure is delivered through software components of the HP Matrix Operating Environment (MOE). This enables management and automation of HP Converged Infrastructure to accelerate infrastructure delivery in a consistently repeatable way. This approach ensures efficient use of IT resources and staff time, and mitigates risks.
In one example of HP Converged Infrastructure deployment, MOE is delivered as an integral part of HP BladeSystem Matrix via Insight Dynamics software, a keystone of HP’s broad offerings for infrastructure management.
Challenge
Traditional data centers are built around an aging, siloed architecture, which limits the ability to build in efficiencies and enhance service levels. In a traditional data center deployment, it can take weeks or months to implement new infrastructure and bring new services online. This challenge can be addressed using a shared services approach.
Shared services best practices
• Automate application deployment and provisioning with standardized templates.
• Provide governance and auditing to ensure resource accountability.
• Provide a variety of platform and availability choices to ensure cost-appropriate service levels.
• Provide hardware for deployments from a reusable and redistributable resource pool to ensure rapid access and maximize utilization.
• Update operational processes to ensure maximum efficiency for operational staff.
• Provide consistent reporting to satisfy management oversight.
HP solution
HP Matrix Operating Environment is a shared-services infrastructure management solution. HP Matrix Operating Environment delivers a common management platform for provisioning and adapting infrastructure to instantly respond to business demands. The HP approach optimizes and automates the management of the resource pools and the IT roles associated with provisioning and consuming resources from these pools, while operating in compliance with core business, security, and
regulatory policies. HP Insight Dynamics and complementary products provide the core functionality of the Matrix Operating Environment.
Functional elements are listed below.
• HP Insight Dynamics enables administrators to manage standalone physical servers, virtual machine hosts and guests, and physical hardware partitions on Integrity servers, all from a single
management console. Insight Dynamics also enables both physical blade servers and virtual machines to be managed as logical servers so they can be easily moved and migrated within a Matrix environment. It delivers a full range of deployment, management, capacity planning,
migration, movement, and disaster recovery capabilities when paired with supported HP server and storage technologies.
• HP Insight Dynamics includes an embedded workflow automation engine based on HP Operations Orchestration that provides role-based design and provisioning. This enables integration with customer IT processes and extensible automation based on customer workflows.
• The Designer within Insight Dynamics enables drag and drop development of infrastructure templates for all of the components of an application infrastructure. These templates are saved to form a service catalog.
• The self-service portal within Insight Dynamics provides authorized users with a catalog of available applications for deployment. Authorization process is driven by the embedded workflow engine.
• Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager takes input from templates to provision the connections between servers, storage, and networking resources for an application.
In addition to delivering applications and services, IT is responsible for managing and allocating costs. A shared services model where IT resources are centralized and shared among business units requires a cultural shift. Agreements need to be put in place between IT and the lines of business for the services that the business needs to have provisioned. HP Converged Infrastructure provides usage and service level reporting tools to ensure IT can demonstrate value add to business customers as well as track resource usage for charge-back.
Support for Industry Standards
HP has a tightly coupled partnering strategy to deliver a Converged Infrastructure in a deployment scenario that works for your unique needs and built on industry standard hardware and interconnects.
HP has more than 180,000 channel partners worldwide, including major and emerging software and hardware vendors as well as system integrators who leverage our products and services. HP works closely with these partners to deliver integrated solutions based on open standards. We deliver solutions that work with your existing infrastructure and provide investment protection for the future.
The HP focus on standards and open partnerships enables IT organizations to move to HP Converged Infrastructure at their own pace and without the fear of being locked in. It enables them to leverage existing investments while reaping the benefits of pooled resources and orchestrated deployments.
HP’s Converged Infrastructure provides the advantages that come with vendor consolidation and integrated engineering while still enabling choice and access to new technologies.
Applying the HP Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model
The technology integration described earlier in this section opens the door to major improvements in data center planning, deployment and operational processes. Infrastructure convergence reflects today’s data center economics, where hardware costs are no longer the only pivot point for IT decisions. Other factors, such as provisioning, power and cooling, and operational flexibility now play an important part in platform decisions. To address those new requirements, HP has created the Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model (CI MM) to help organizations put in place the skills and processes required to reap the benefits of HP Converged Infrastructure. HP provides a roadmap for Converged Infrastructure and a path to make steps from your current state to an automated and adaptively sourced infrastructure.
The value of applying CI MM comes from building capability in key aspects of the data center competence, as shown in the following table. By adopting HP CI MM and integrating the
recommended skills and tools, each area of competence can be supported by the required level of maturity.
Table 3. Scope and Stages of HP Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model
Areas of Competence Stages of Maturity
Technology and Architecture Management and Processes Culture and IT Staff
Demand Supply and IT Governance
Stage 5 – Adaptively sourced infrastructure Stage 4 – Automated, Service-oriented Stage 3 – Optimized
Stage 2 – Standardized
Stage 1 – Compartmentalized or Legacy
Within this guide, the discussion is limited to how CI MM can assist with the rollout of applications services within the HP Converged Infrastructure Reference Architecture. Specific application workloads, based on the Converged Infrastructure Reference Architecture, are defined in the next section. For a broader view of how to apply CI MM to improve data center capability, refer to the section at the end of this document titled “For More Information”.
Overview of the Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model
CI MM provides criteria-based measures of organizational capability. These criteria are based on working with hundreds of organizations across a wide range of industries. HP’s goal is to assist companies to improve capability and achieve specific business objectives. HP has found that as IT organizations develop maturity relative to the model, their capability to deploy shared services infrastructure increases. This increased competency then generates significant value to the business.
As an example, the table illustrates how HP Converged Infrastructure aligns to the maturity model.
Table 4. Scoping and mapping of stages of maturity to data center capability and HP products
CI MM Stage Infrastructure Model Organizational Capability Converged Infrastructure Offerings
Stage 5 – Adaptively
sourced infrastructure Federated cloud Automated management and
reallocation of infrastructure HP cloud offerings delivered via Converged Infrastructure Stage 4 – Automated,
Service-oriented Private cloud Infrastructure offered as a
service HP BladeSystem Matrix
integrated with HP StorageWorks scale-out Storage, HPN A-Series Stage 3 – Optimized Standards-based, fully
virtualized infrastructure
Rationalized technologies, architecture, management tools and processes
HP BladeSystem c-Class with Virtual Connect, HP StorageWorks virtualization, HPN A-Series
Stage 2 – Standardized Integrated components,
virtualization Standardized technologies,
drive deployment decisions HP BladeSystem c-Class, HP StorageWorks disk arrays, HPN A-Series
Stage 1 –
Compartmentalized or Legacy
Silos of distributed
servers Project-based decisions, ad hoc management tools and processes
HP Integrity or HP ProLiant Servers, HP StorageWorks DAS or Internal Storage, HPN A-Series and E-Series
Organizations that have already deployed infrastructure based on the HP BladeSystem c-Class already have IT staff with expertise at the “Level 2 – Standardized” maturity level. They can be leveraged to develop a broader set of Level 2 capability and also to peak their skills towards Level 3 or beyond.
Skills competency and maturity levels
HP Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model matches tools and skills at each maturity level, enabling IT organizations to incrementally grow capability and see the results reflected in improved business results. HP Converged Infrastructure is built from standards-based products, and so enables step by step improvement in capability. IT organizations can easily build on their existing investments, rather than having to start from scratch.
The following table illustrates how HP management tools enable organizations to achieve higher levels of maturity and capability.
Table 5. CI MM stage and representative HP products
CI MM Stage Level of Automation Supporting Converged
Infrastructure Products Stage 5 – Adaptively sourced
infrastructure Automated management and
reallocation of converged infrastructure HP Cloud Service Automation, HP BTO Software
Stage 4 – Automated, Service-
oriented Infrastructure and applications offered
as a service through self-service portal HP Insight Dynamics, HP BTO Software, HP Cloud Service Automation for Matrix Stage 3 – Optimized Deploy template-based services and
applications HP Insight Dynamics
Stage 2 – Standardized Rapidly reallocate resources to meet
business needs HP Insight Control
HP Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager, HPNA/NMMi Stage 1 – Compartmentalized or
Legacy Scripted processes and silo-specific
capabilities HP Systems Insight Manager,
HP Intelligent Management Center
Operational advantages of high maturity levels
At higher levels of maturity, resource pools become an elastic extension of business requirements. The large common pool of compute, storage and bandwidth means that the resources needed to meet new requirements can be provisioned quickly. Standardization of building block resources, coupled with simplified authorization processes mean less time and money are spent readying infrastructure for changing business needs. At the same time, resource reporting and analysis can ensure resource utilization, so that usage and cost allocation are transparent to business users.
Evolutionary vs. transformational approach
Adoption of converged infrastructure combines technology advances with improvements in
organizational skills and processes. Each complements the other. Within existing environments, HP Converged Infrastructure naturally enables evolutionary adoption of tools and incremental levels of automation and efficiency. For new “greenfield” IT investments, HP Converged Infrastructure enables IT staff to deploy resources that span business needs, rather than simply individual silos.
The next section defines recommended architectures, and some specific configuration examples, for a broad range of common enterprise workloads. Because these workloads share a common
infrastructure, capacity planning can be much more efficient. In the past, IT grew as a set of standalone silos, each planned and operated separately. With HP Converged Infrastructure, that larger set of requirements can be addressed up front, and efficiencies can be driven across the entire IT infrastructure.
HP Converged Infrastructure Reference Architectures
Overview
HP Converged Infrastructure enables IT organizations to deploy a standards-based, common infrastructure to implement new solutions, or evolve existing ones. This common Converged Infrastructure “core” can be flexibly deployed to meet business objectives and create an agile IT solution environment.
The sections that follow provide specific examples of how HP Converged Infrastructure can be used as a core architectural approach to supporting these common enterprise workloads:
• ERP/CRM, using SAP ERP 6.0.
• Messaging and Collaboration, using Microsoft Exchange.
• Cloud computing, with a focus on enterprise private cloud.
• Virtualization, covering x86 and HP-UX virtualization technologies and three use cases.
Additional use cases are under development.
These configurations demonstrate the flexibility of the basic HP Converged Infrastructure architecture.
They are a guide for planners and architects to illustrate practical application of the architecture to mainstream enterprise workloads. They also illustrate how specific tools, such as orchestration templates, can be employed to simplify deployment. Please consult your HP sales representative for support on planning any particular solution or deployment for your organization.
Generalized Reference Architecture
HP Converged Infrastructure relies on a common set of components, associated with a comprehensive set of service definition, deployment, and management tools. Infrastructure components can be deployed, and redeployed, to meet business needs. These common components can be utilized all, or in part, to create a platform on which to build IT solutions. These components provide a “core” for solution deployments and enhance the maturity and agility level of the entire IT environment, as described earlier.
The agile data center provisions from pools of resources for services requested by the users from portals, APIs, or other interfaces. These virtual/physical resource pools include servers, storage, and networking which are allocated from automation resources over the converged network. These pools of resources will be orchestrated by the operations orchestration to deliver the services requested via
“service catalogs” based on business SLAs. Depending on the SLA, the required scalability,
availability, and local or remote disaster recovery will be enabled. Monitoring of these resources will occur at the infrastructure, application, and end user side. Capacity will be typically available on- demand and elastic to address workload spikes, such as during peak business events.
From a functional perspective, Figure 6 depicts how these data center operations are addressed by the core elements that form the HP Converged Infrastructure architecture.
