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HP Monday introduced its Adaptive Infrastructure portfolio, consisting of BladeSystem Matrix and the Matrix Orchestration Environment (MOE), which are designed to make it simpler and faster to deploy blade systems.
HP’s latest offering aims to simplify server blade deployments.
Deploying a blade is nowhere near as simple as deploying a new laptop. There must be all manner of hardware planning involving separate teams that handle the server, storage connection, network connection, virtualization environment and security.
The Matrix products borrow a concept familiar to object-oriented programmers; reuse. It lets an administrator define all of the settings needed for a blade, from its storage access to operating system and IP address, and save them as a template.
When new blades are deployed, the template can then be reused to deploy the blade with all of the settings, rather than bringing in all the teams again to wire up the blade. Templates can be used as-is or modified slightly to adjust for changes as needed.
In one instance, HP helped a test customer cut blade deployment from 33 days to two hours. “We’ve taken this complex choreography that takes many weeks and boil it down to something you can do with the push of a button,” Gary Thome, chief strategist for HP’s infrastructure and blades group told InternetNews.com.
Of course, it is limited to HP’s BladeSystem hardware, but it can discover and support non-HP hardware, such as storage and networking equipment.
Matrix handles the creation of the templates, while MOE software provides a unified management interface to rapidly design, deploy and optimize the application infrastructure.
Matrix comes with HP’s new Virtual Connect 8Gb Fibre Channel and Flex-10 Ethernet modules, two network adapters designed to offer high speed connections without needing additional switches or cables to connect them. HP claims up to a 55 percent network equipment cost savings with the Virtual Connect Flex-10.
As part of the Matrix announcement, HP is offering new products to take excess storage capacity from any vendor, anywhere in the network, and turn it into a single pool of shared storage.
The new HP LeftHand P4000 SAN solutions handles load balancing and even deployment of storage, while the HP StorageWorks SB40c with P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance Software bundle is a shared storage solution that supports a virtualized blade server infrastructure.
HP is working with ISV partners to create deployment profiles to fit commonly-used applications, so theoretically, there could be templates for deploying MySQL databases or Oracle CRM software or business intelligence applications. HP has not disclosed which applications it will support but expects to announce them shortly.
Matrix is available through HP Factory Express, the company’s customization and integration service.
Article courtesy of InternetNews.com
