Smart Power Distribution, a Little Cloud History and More

This week I attended HP ISS Tech Day at Hewlett-Packard's Houston facility along with several other bloggers. In some cases one we talked a bit about the definition of cloud computing and toured the POD-Works facility for manufacturing private clouds. In some cases two we'll look at HP's technologies for building private clouds, including Intelligent Power Discovery and Virtual Connect. We'll as well take a brief look at HP's original private cloud offering.

HP cites its expertise in power management as a key advantage to its manufactured data centers that it ships in containers to clients. Now even if you don't want to have HP ship you a pre-built data center, you can take advantage of its Intelligent Power Discovery innovation.

The core of HP's converged infrastructure strategy

BladeSystem Matrix is the core of HP's "converged infrastructure" strategy. It's a framework that integrates servers, storage, networking and software and can be used as the foundation for building private clouds. Its primary software offering is the Matrix Operating Environment, which includes templates for deploying virtualized servers. HP gives clients the option to choose between Citrix, Microsoft and VMWare for virtualization and includes templates for fully configured servers for common products from companies like Oracle, Microsoft and SAP. For instance, as part of the demo a Microsoft Exchange server was deployed from a template in just a few clicks.

BladeSystem Matrix was preceded by the HP Utility Data Center in 2001, back when cloud computing was on the whole referred to as utility computing. UDC was discontinued in 2004. CNET's Gordon Haff wrote in 2009 that UDC was ahead of its time, expensive and tied to proprietary HP software. Haff wrote that BladeSystem Matrix is much more rooted open standards and elements than UDC was.

Virtualizing servers can put an excessive I/O load on the host server since those servers will be handling many more concurrent connections. HP Virtual Connect attempts to solve this problem during simultaneously reducing network infrastructure complexity. This IDC white paper offers the best explanation of Virtual Connect I could find.

Virtual machine environments typically require six to eight physical network cards per server. Virtual Connect creates virtual network cards that look and yet as physical network cards to hypervisors. One physical network card can support four virtual network cards. This doesn't just reduce the need for additional physical network cards, it as well reduces the number of switches and cables required to support all those cards.

Virtual Connect can as well provide bandwidth throttling on the fly. Let's say you have a server that needs more bandwidth than one gigabit. Traditionally, that server would need a 10 gigabit network card, even if it doesn't to tell the truth need 10 gigabits of capacity. With Virtual Connect, you could create multiple virtual network cards using the same physical 10 gigabit network cards and split the bandwidth between them any way you want. For instance, you could create four virtual network cards: one network card with five gigabits of bandwidth, two network cards with two gigabits of bandwidth each and one network card with one gigabit of bandwidth.

The lowest possible total cost of ownership HP

HP is serious about helping clients build private clouds as simply as possible with the lowest possible total cost of ownership HP. Whether you want them to build something for you or build it yourself, HP has all the products and services required - from building and shipping entire data centers, to cutting power bills to virtualizing both servers and network infrastructure. HP seems to be the leader in each of the technologies we looked at, nevertheless there is plenty of competition. It will be exciting to see how the industrialization of physical infrastructure and virtualization of everything else transforms data centers in the at once few years.

IBM had a credit card processor client with more than 4,700 servers spread across 10 data centers. IBM did an analysis and found that the servers were being underutilized. IBM emploted VMware and Intel innovation to create a virtualization platform that consolidated servers and lowered the time and cost of administration.