In conversation with Heena Jhingan, Vikram K, Director- Industry Standard Servers, HP India, discusses about the new trends and solutions in server space.
What are the new offerings from HP on the server side?
Early this year, we launched the HP ProLiant Gen8 servers, which are the result of an investment of $300 million and two years of work on a programme called Project Voyager that includes more than 900 filed patents and a new systems architecture, called HP ProActive Insight architecture.
With intelligent technologies that automate tasks and significantly improve uptime, HP Proactive Insight architecture, will span across the HP Converged Infrastructure and address the top concerns of enterprises.
In September this year, HP announced the next phase of ProLiant Gen8 innovations, driving new levels of economics. The new HP ProLiant BL660c and DL560 Gen8 servers help customers implement compute-intensive applications and extend Virtualization as a foundation for building private and hybrid Clouds while delivering a RoI within three months.
The new BL660c and DL560 Gen8 are density-optimized, 4-socket servers built on HP ProActive Insight architecture and powered by the latest Intel Xeon processor E5-4600 product family.
How do you see the market shifting to the converged server-storage solutions?
The Indian industry has moved to the second stage of Virtualization. The enterprises have started investing in converged solutions. We already have over 100 customers, who have opted for converged solutions and we see the numbers growing continuously.
The single architecture helps customers build a robust infrastructure. The enterprises are looking at a hybrid environment, while doing so their focus is on achieving full automation, which gets simplified over a single architecture.
HP Converged Infrastructure accelerates the provisioning of IT services and applications by integrating servers, storage, networking, security, power, cooling and facilities into shared pools of interoperable resources all managed through a common management platform, and delivered via world-class services.
Using the HP Converged Infrastructure, organisations are able to shift their IT spend away from operations (through standardisation, virtualization and automation of IT), and double enterprise resources focused on innovation to drive competitive advantage.
As an example many customers moving to virtual and Cloud data centres are evaluating integrated stack offerings. HP? VirtualSystem and CloudSystem solutions combine HP 3PAR Storage and HP BladeSystem/ProLiant servers factory integrated with automation software to speed deployment. HP CloudSystem Matrix is a software interface that automates the deployment of Infrastructure and Software as a Service including complete storage provisioning with HP Storage.
So, how have you performed on the converged systems front? What kind of business are you expecting form the new offerings?
According to the IDC APAC Quarterly Enterprise Server Tracker, Q2 2012, August 2012 release, HP was the leader in the India x86 server market with 45.1% unit shipment share in Q2 2012. Additionally, we were also the leader in the India x86 Blade server market with 75.6% unit shipment share in Q2 2012.
We have high expectations from the new offerings. We would be going after the high end customers, who require end to end Virtualization. The Indian enterprises are awaiting a Cloud revolution, we have packaged solutions for the market and consulting teams and service units. With the new portfolio we are trying to maximize the market potential. The new servers deliver unprecedented levels of density and compute power in less space at significant cost savings, helping customers extend Virtualization as a foundation for building private and hybrid Clouds.
How do the new offerings simplify the process of migrating complex workloads to Cloud ?
By bolstering the hardware platform to support Virtualization and the inclusion of new features available in hypervisors such as direct I/O, the Gen8 servers offer up to 50% better Virtualization performance as compared to Generation 7 servers. This allows customers to adopt high-end production workloads under Virtualization.
Earlier, security concerns over data in the Cloud led to very cautious adoption of the hybrid or public Cloud.
Our new offerings under the HP CloudSystem solution portfolio address enterprise requirements for private, hybrid and public Cloud deployments. The solutions provide enterprises with additional flexibility, scalability and customisable solution for full scale private and hybrid Cloud.
The HP CloudSystem Service Provider edition is optimised for multi-tenancy and with its customer-centered portal, it is ideal for public and hosted/managed Cloud to deliver complete service aggregation and management. Furthermore, to simplify the process of migrating workloads to Cloud, we have a unique offering in HP Cloud Maps that pre-packages application templates to ease deploying workloads. The customised catalogs of application services allow push-button deployment of applications in Cloud.
