T E C H N I C A L B R I E F
O p t i m i z i n g S e r v e r M a n a g e m e n t
Sponsored by: HP Jed Scaramella August 2010 S u m m a r yHP Insight Software is integrated management software to manage infrastructures including HP ProLiant, HP Integrity, and HP BladeSystem. A core element of the HP Converged Infrastructure and Matrix Operating Environment, HP Insight Software is designed to provide customers with deeper insight into their systems to make more informed decisions, precise control to accomplish more in less time, and ongoing optimization to deliver better services. The HP Insight Software portfolio includes HP Insight Control and HP Insight Dynamics, which play a central role in reducing overall data center operating expenses and differentiating HP offerings from competitive offerings.
The core value proposition for HP Insight Control covers five primary areas:
` Deploy. With tools to automate deployment and migration of physical and virtual servers, HP Insight Control allows servers to be deployed quickly and with less risk than using manual processes.
` Manage. Incorporating HP Systems Insight Manager (SIM) and HP Insight Remote Support software, HP Insight Control enables administrators to proactively manage the health of their systems. IDC research with HP Insight Control customers conducted in June 2010 found that using these products yielded greater than 80% reduction in hardware downtime hours per month. ` Optimize. Companies can increase data center capacity and reduce their power
bill through improved power management features. Dynamic Power Capping, Data Center Power Control, and Intelligent Power Discovery enable power optimization at both a data center level and a server level.
` Control. With Integrated Lights-Out 3 Advanced (iLO 3 Advanced) functionality, HP Insight Control lets administrators manage servers remotely, enabling companies to reduce administrative burden and travel expenses.
` Integrate. Integrations with Microsoft System Center and VMware vCenter Server enable administrators to monitor physical and virtual servers as well as applications from a single management console.
IDC recently completed an updated ROI analysis of the value of incorporating HP Insight Control and determined that over a three-year period customers achieved an average ROI of over 600% and a total economic benefit over three years of more than $73,000 per 100 users from IT staff efficiencies, infrastructure cost reductions, prevention of revenue loss, and user productivity savings.
D a t a C e n t e r s L o o k t o S t r e a m l i n e M a n a g e m e n t C o m p l e x i t y a n d R e d u c e T C O
Enterprises report to IDC that IT management and administration costs have grown to eclipse all other cost categories. Driven by an explosion in the installed base of servers (see Figure 1), the personnel cost required to manage and maintain servers has put a strain on the majority of businesses' data center IT budgets. As a result, IT budgets are coming under closer scrutiny, with an eye toward identifying solutions that can demonstrably reduce costs by simplifying IT infrastructures and automating management processes.
F I G U R E 1
W o r l d w i d e I T S p e n d i n g o n S e r v e r s , P o w e r a n d C o o l i n g , a n d M a n a g e m e n t / A d m i n i s t r a t i o n , 1 9 9 6 – 2 0 1 2
Source: IDC, 2010
As Figure 1 shows, customers have been able to maintain a relatively flat level of capital expenditures on new servers. This has been accomplished through customers shifting their infrastructure to lower-priced standards-based x86 servers and away from high-priced mainframe and Unix server systems. The transition has controlled spending on server hardware but has resulted in a significant increase in the numbers
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server "sprawl" within their environments. Yet, at the same time, virtualization is presenting new management challenges. As shown in Figure 1, IDC data indicates that the number of virtual machine deployments is rapidly climbing and is expected to exceed to the total number of physical servers in five years. "Virtual sprawl" is replacing "physical sprawl," proving the need for management solutions that have control and automation capabilities for both virtual and physical systems.
In addition, server sprawl has led to a number of other problems for today's IT organizations:
` Inflexibility. As currently deployed by most organizations, server configurations are static, hardwired, and difficult to change.
` Manual coordination. Maintaining and changing applications or server configuration require too many people to perform too many manual steps.
` Underutilization. With 1:1 application-to-server deployment ratios, only a fraction of most servers' total capacity is typically utilized.
` Overprovisioning. Hand in hand with underutilization, overprovisioning results in wasted rack space, power, cooling, bandwidth, and operational costs.
` Unique management requirements. Many processes and applications supported by servers are unique, requiring IT organizations to maintain individual tools and coordinate inconsistent configurations to handle them all.
In sum, server infrastructures can often consume large amounts of space, power, and IT administration time. The costs associated with deploying, monitoring, and managing servers have escalated to the point where IT organizations are actively seeking tools to help them manage costs by streamlining management and automating key server management tasks throughout the data center.
H P I n s i g h t C o n t r o l
F I G U R E 2
H P ' s D e p i c t i o n o f K e y H P I n s i g h t C o n t r o l V a l u e s
Notes:
1.IDC research conducted with seven HP Insight Control customers and completed in June 2010 found that deployment times per server were reduced 84%.
2..IDC research on HP Insight Control1 found an 83% reduction in hours of downtime per month
for internal users.
3..HP Performance Engineering Team, 2008 Benchmark estimates that customers may deploy triple the number of servers per power capacity using Dynamic Power Capping. This estimate uses server faceplate values and server density improvements that may vary based on how customers budget power and cooling resources.
4. IDC research on HP Insight Control1 found average IT staff efficiency savings of over $25,000
per year per site.
Source: HP and IDC, 2010
HP Insight Control helps differentiate HP server offerings by making them simpler and more seamless to manage. By taking advantage of intelligence built into the hardware platform, they can help simplify deployment and infrastructure life-cycle management, which in turn can increase system availability, create tangible data center efficiencies, and provide administrators with greater control.
Additionally, it allows them to do imaging, hardware, and operating system configuration from a single interface. HP estimates that an HP ProLiant server can be deployed 12 times faster using HP Insight Control than using vendor-provided CDs or DVDs.
Because change is inevitable in a data center, HP Insight Control server migration provides an automated method to migrate existing workloads to new HP ProLiant or HP BladeSystem servers. HP Insight Control supports multiple virtualization environments, including VMware and Microsoft. It provides the automated ability to transfer OS, applications, settings, and stored data to save time and reduce risk. Proactive Management to Reduce Unplanned Downtime
HP Insight Control includes HP Systems Insight Manager, which enables administrators to proactively monitor their infrastructure from a single console, and HP Insight Remote Support, which allows customers to provide secure remote support for servers, storage, and network environments. It allows them to keep an eye on system health, performance, workload functions, server utilization, and power usage, and they can monitor HP ProLiant and HP BladeSystem infrastructures from the same console. It also enables proactive management and response to configuration anomalies and performance issues.
HP Insight Control provides central management of virtual machines with physical host to virtual machine association; identification of virtual machines or host servers reaching high CPU, memory, or disk utilization levels; flexible move capabilities that allow live moves (for some platforms) and moves to dissimilar host resources; and backup, template, and alternate host capabilities that enable restoration of virtual machines on any available host. IDC interviews with HP Insight Control customers found that by managing system health proactively, they have been able to reduce unplanned downtime by over 80% on average.
Increase Data Center Capacity by Optimizing Power Management HP Insight Control is designed to help data center managers optimize power management, both to increase data center scalability and to reduce their power bill. It provides power management optimization capabilities at both the data center level and the rack level.
Data Center Pow e r Cont rol : O ptimi zin g Pow e r U sage Ac ro s s the D at a C e n t e r
Dy namic Pow e r Cap ping and In tel li gent Pow e r Di sc overy : Pow e r M a n a g e m e n t a t t h e R a c k Le v e l
With Dynamic Power Capping, HP Insight Control can help companies measure, manage, and reduce the amount of power required by the servers in their data center. It enables companies to identify unused or "trapped" power capacity at the rack level and to deploy servers to reclaim this capacity. Organizations can then set power caps at the individual server or HP BladeSystem enclosure level to ensure the infrastructure does not exceed the available energy budget, even at times of peak server load. HP Insight Control also provides a view of the data center, showing the layout of the rack and inlet temperatures of the servers, and the ability to see a thermal and electrical view of the rack.
With Intelligent Power Discovery, HP Insight Control can manage power usage of legacy HP and non-HP servers. Intelligent Power Discovery is enabled by special cabling that automatically discovers key parameters of the server (such as the server type and size as well as IP address) and feeds the information to HP Insight Control to reduce errors in compiling system inventory information and to automate the monitoring and management of power requirements at the server and rack level. Control Systems Remotely to Reduce Administrative and Travel Expenses
Now in its fifth generation, HP iLO 3 Advanced lets administrators control their servers remotely from almost anywhere. It allows administrators to take control of systems from a central location to restart servers, control power settings, update software, and interact with the operating system remotely. It provides a full graphic view of the server as well as automatic video recording and team collaboration capabilities. And because iLO 3 Advanced can be used to diagnose server problems regardless of the server's geographical location, it helps customers save on staff time and travel budgets.
Enhancements to iLO 3 include improved performance of the remote console that HP benchmarks as eight times faster than that available with iLO 2, improvements to the management interface to make it easier and more intuitive to use, and enhanced standards support, particularly for security and single sign-on standards.
Integrate to Extend Server Management to Other Leading Consoles HP Insight Control now incorporates deep-level integration with both Microsoft System Center and VMware vCenter. With these integrations, customers can take advantage of HP Insight Control management capabilities for their server environments using the management console they are already familiar with or have already installed, and they can perform physical and virtual server and application management from the same console.
a single console to manage their infrastructure at both the hardware level and the application level without having to switch back and forth between two different management consoles.
HP Insight Control also ties in with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, enabling customers to perform predictive failure on Hyper-V hosts and reduce downtime for their virtual machines. This works by detecting situations such as failure of a redundant power supply or redundant fan in a server, which would not bring the server down but would make the server no longer highly available. In these situations, the virtual machine would be automatically moved to another server in the environment, allowing the administrator to go in and remediate the problem, bring the server back up, and balance the load. Finally, HP Insight Control integrates with Microsoft System Center's bare-metal deployment capabilities to simplify deployment of Windows onto HP ProLiant servers.
V M w ar e v C e n t e r
Similar to its support for Microsoft System Center, HP Insight Control now supports deep integration with VMware vCenter. On its own, VMware vCenter provides management capability at the virtual layer; combined with HP Insight Control, customers can now manage both their physical and virtual assets from a single console.
HP Insight Control is represented as a tab in the vCenter console and allows administrators to monitor system health, perform power optimization, view alarms, and take automated action based on alerts that come from HP Insight Control. HP Insight Control power optimization capabilities also extend those offered by vCenter; vCenter enables power management targeted to the data center or cluster level but not at the server level. The integration allows administrators to take advantage of HP Insight Control server-level power management capabilities from the vCenter console.
HP Insight Control for Linux
HP Insight Control for Linux (HP ICE-LX) is a Linux-based version of HP Insight Control. When integrating HP and open source technology, HP ICE-LX becomes a full-featured management tool for companies that require a Linux-based central management console. Like HP Insight Control, HP ICE-LX provides deployment, power management, remote management, and system discovery and health monitoring capabilities. It unifies the management of Linux-based servers, storage, power and cooling, and networked devices from a single console.
HP Insight Dynamics
Complementing HP Insight Control in HP's Insight Software portfolio, HP Insight Dynamics can help companies tackle a number of technology issues in new and innovative ways. This software delivers a number of key benefits:
CPU, memory, network, disk, and even power at the individual server level and works both for HP infrastructure and for any x86-based servers or HP Integrity servers in the infrastructure. It allows ongoing rebalancing and repurposing of workloads, allows organizations to instantly see available infrastructure on which to deploy new workloads, and identifies servers that push their capacity limits and that could be rebalanced.
` Energy-aware capacity planning. HP Insight Dynamics provides the data and tools necessary to plan server capacity and power needs. It enables power usage planning for different scenarios and enables companies to see their best choices for provisioning and redeploying servers in an energy-efficient manner.
` High availability. Many organizations use complex, clustered configurations to provide high-availability failover capability to a handful of business-critical applications. By using HP Insight Dynamics to shift workloads to physical servers at alternative locations during periods of unplanned downtime, companies can bring "everyday" high availability to a broader range of applications, and with the recovery management capabilities of HP Insight Dynamics, companies can implement cost-effective disaster recovery with automated failover to remote metropolitan-distance sites.
` Dynamic infrastructure provisioning. Configuring, testing, and troubleshooting applications in multitier environments can be cumbersome and time consuming. With the infrastructure orchestration feature of HP Insight Dynamics, organizations can visually design and automatically provision infrastructure environments from pools of resources, including servers with storage and network connections.
Driving ROI with HP Insight Control
In 2010 IDC interviewed IT staff members from seven companies to conduct an ROI analysis of the benefits associated with using HP Insight Control solutions. This research found that customers were able to realize total benefits over a three-year period of more than $73,000 for every 100 users and that these benefits grew as more solutions were added to the mix. Three-year return on investment ranged from just under 450% for implementing a single component of HP Insight Control to over 600% for implementing all HP Insight Control components.
These gains come from operational efficiencies and reduced hardware and software costs that companies can realize by improving their ability to deploy, monitor, optimize, control, and integrate their server infrastructure. Some of the key areas of benefit include:
` User productivity savings. Improvements to end users' productivity is another important area of benefit. With many employees dependent on information technology to perform critical business tasks, reduced server downtime and better user-facing system performance can yield significant improvements to employee productivity.
` Protected revenue. Improved server performance and reduced downtime can also have a positive impact on revenue. This is true whether companies rely directly on their systems for revenue-generating activities (e.g., companies that engage in ecommerce) or whether the systems have a less direct effect on revenue (e.g., companies with telesales or call centers whose employees depend on customer relationship management or sales force automation systems). ` IT infrastructure savings. Areas of savings include efficiencies in power and
cooling, hardware life-cycle cost savings, and avoided travel costs. I D C A n a l y s i s
The competitive business environment is placing pressure on IT managers to simultaneously accelerate their IT capacity and maintain budget expenditures. The challenge to deliver enhanced levels of service-level agreements has become increasingly difficult due to increasingly complex infrastructures and the introduction of virtualization technologies. All indications suggest that IT budgets will not see substantial or even mild increases in the near term, leaving IT managers to seek ways to reduce and reappropriate spending. Operational expenses, such as server management and power and cooling, have grown to become significant cost factors in IT budgets, taking financial resources and staff time away from innovative initiatives that drive value to the business.
With HP Insight Control, HP has delivered a holistic management solution for HP BladeSystem and HP ProLiant within a single package, one that automates key management functions and reduces key pain points. HP Insight Control provides server management functions in terms of automated deployment, performance monitoring, remote management, energy management, and virtualization management, which can streamline IT deployments, reduce unplanned downtime, improve power provisioning, and enable unified management for physical and virtual systems. Along with HP Insight Dynamics, HP Insight Control can reduce the time required for infrastructure management while increasing overall flexibility. As a result, IT managers can improve their overall productivity and staff satisfaction by shifting resources from performing mundane maintenance operations to focusing on data center enhancements and revenue-generating activities.
C o n c l u s i o n
With the launch of the latest version of its HP Insight Control software, HP continues to push its server management capabilities to new levels. Improved management capabilities can help data center administrators reduce their overall server management complexity, respond more efficiently to change, and improve ROI. The key value propositions of HP Insight Control include streamlining server deployment, improving management of server environments, optimizing power resources, providing remote administration and control, and integrating with other leading management consoles, including Microsoft System Center and VMware vCenter. By incorporating HP Insight Control and HP Insight Dynamics into their infrastructure, customers can automate key management processes and perform more work in less time. They can focus their IT resources on activities that deliver strategic value to their organization rather than working on time-consuming manual processes. By shifting resources to more strategic efforts, they can improve responsiveness to business requirements and drive improved ROI.
C o p y r i g h t N o t i c e
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