Reality Check: Server Insights : virtualization

Gaining a 4D view of your data center

Kristie Popp — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:50:00 GMT

By Brandon Fears

Product Manager, HP Data Center Environmental Edge

Part of the focus of the HP Data Center Smart Grid is not only monitoring / managing power at the IT level, but also visualizing and optimizing the power and cooling infrastructure. This is where the newest version of the HP Data Center Environmental Edge solution is key to achieving the insight needed to measure and understand current energy usage and historical trends. The solution helps both IT and facility managers understand how their cooling infrastructure is operating and visually show where they have issues to be addressed.

As the team began the development on the Environmental Edge Program, we conducted customer visits and formal market research to better understand how customers monitor and optimize their data centers. The one item that kept coming to the top was the lack of knowledge on how much power in KWh was consumed in a day, week or a month. The most common answers were, “Maybe if I look at our electrical bill”, or “I don’t know because the data center is part of the office and facility managers pay the bill”. Therefore we began working on the second half of the Environmental Edge solution: power visualization.

In the view below, as the customer scrolls over their data center layout, they can see real time results from the energy base stations to understand power, and environmental base stations to get information on cooling at the rack level.

Customers can also provide drill down on an energy meter and get more robust information, amps per phase, voltage per phase, KWh, and power factor.

Additionally, the solution can show power usage for the past 18 months, and provide several different reports. This is just part of the new power visualization capabilities. Customers can also opt to have real-time PUE, see power consumption at the rack level with our branch circuit monitoring solution (BCMS). The goal of our solution is to help customers use their infrastructure more efficiently and help match the output to the needs of IT.

HP VMworld session: Conquering Costs and Complexity in a Virtualized Environment

Kristie Popp — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 06:12:00 GMT

I attended a thought leadership session at Vmworld today, “Conquering Costs and Complexity in a Virtualized Environment”. In 1996, there were roughly 6 million servers. In 2009, that number has increased to nearly 32 million servers. In the presentation link below, HP & IDC outline graphs of expenses and the rise in costs which are baffling. What is the largest cost? People. Next? Power & cooling. A big point brought up at the session was, ‘who heard of power capping from the local utility center 10 years ago’? Well, no one. But with city infrastructures being tapped too hard, it had to happen. Draw these lines for expenses for management, power and cooling and utility costs on a graph looking five years out - it will be unmanageable. A few great comments that came out of the meeting: “Find that real estate management person who’s paying the power bill and that one will help you make the argument for virtualization and justify consolidation.” and “5 ‘9s’? no. need all ‘9s’. 100% availability. Web commerce doesn’t wait an hour.”

Virtualization is helping but needs to attack the growing costs and ongoing management of the datacenter, flipping the expense of operation to expense on innovation. The session leaders spoke of the data center as a system relationships & new innovations and management tools need a holistic approach.

From Mark Linesch, the HP session leader:

Virtualization has sparked an overall industry discussion on the changing face of the datacenter. It has helped increase utilization rates and been a major disruptor to traditional data center operations. With the number of virtual machines exploding however, virtualization has also introduced new challenges and opportunities on the transformational journey to conquer costs and complexity and move toward a shared and service-oriented data center environment.

Our session at VMworld 2009 is all about tackling the issues AFTER those first early successes have been achieved. Armed with the latest research from Michelle Bailey at IDC, we discuss the facts about virtual sprawl and the need to rethink IT management and processes.

For example, many organizations are beginning to use vMotion-type capabilities in their production environments. As part of our session, we discuss how customers can further lower costs and dramatically increase their ROI from VMware with automation tools and experience. We also tackle energy as IT managers re-architect the datacenter and implement a broad range of solutions to fit more servers into existing power and space constraints. It still amazes me that today’s G6 ProLiant servers from HP can increase performance by up to 10x while reducing power consumption by 10x – saving costs and lowering energy consumption. But this is just the beginning of a comprehensive strategy that is needed to lower costs and reclaim power within existing data center environments.

Here are some take-aways from the session:

• Download our whitepapers:

− Orchestration for the Business-Driven Data Center http://www.eds.com/insights/whitepapers/5846/

− Realizing TCO Savings with HP BladeSystem Virtual Connect Flex-10 Technology, IDC Whitepaper

http://www.hp.com/go/realizing-tco

• Navy Marine Corps Intranet case study: http://www.eds.com/insights/casestudies/nmci-virtualizing-servers.aspx

Here are the slides from HP & IDC presented at the session. http://www.slideshare.net/HPintheEnterprise/conquering-costs-and-complexity-in-a-virtualized-environment

Presenting today were:
Mark Linesch Vice President, Strategy and Portfolio Management, Enterprise Servers and Networking
HP
Rob Taylor Vice President, Data Center Services, Infrastructure Services, EDS an HP company
HP
Michelle Bailey Research Vice President, Enterprise Platforms and Datacenter Trends
IDC

We would look forward to any feedback and thoughts on this topic.

Play HP’s VMworld 2009 Fun Facts Twitter Contest and Take a Friend to Coffee On Us!

Kristie Popp — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 17:08:00 GMT

During VMworld 2009, we invite you to participate in HP’s VMworld 2009 Fun Facts Contest on Twitter.

Beginning Tuesday, Sept. 1st through Thursday, Sept. 3rd, we’ll be giving away $10 electronic Starbuck’s gift cards to the first person to correctly answer our HP VMworld Fun Facts trivia questions on Twitter.

Here’s how the contest will work:

Step 1: Make sure you’re following these HP Twitter accounts @ProLiant @BladeNews and @ HPStorageGuy

Step 2: Be on the lookout for HP VMWorld and virtualization-related Fun Facts posted by all of the above Twitter accounts, as well as re-tweeted by other HP Tweeters or colleagues and take note!

Step 3: Sometime between the hours of 9am-5pm PT Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday during the show, each of the above accounts @ProLiant @BladeNews and @HPStorage Guy will post a HP VMworld Fun Fact trivia contest question, which gives you 3 chances to win each day! And one of the three will post an extra one each day, for a total of 12 chances to win (but you’ve got to be paying attention!)

Step 4: Be the first person to tweet a reply with the correct answer to whomever asked the Fun Fact question @ProLiant, @BladeNews or @HPStorageGuy and you will win a $10 Starbucks card, which will be sent electronically via email. We’ll announce winners via Twitter and Direct Message winners to find out where to email winners their prize.

It’s that EASY! And remember, you can’t win if you don’t play!

New AMD Six-core Opteron™ Processors add more horsepower to the industry’s x-86 workhorse

anand.akela@hp.com — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 07:01:00 GMT

Current economic, environmental and energy constraints often do not make it possible to add additional servers in the data center to align with the demands of the business. As a result, companies are looking to consolidate workloads on fewer servers to reclaim the underutilized capacity, lower the total cost of ownership and simplify data center management. Virtualization technologies, like VMware, on larger platforms such as the HP ProLiant DL785 G6 are key to improving server utilization.

HP ProLiant DL785 G6, with 48 processing cores, up to 512 GB memory and 11 PCI-e I/O ports, provides ample resources for very large number of virtual machines and offers a very high consolidation and virtualization ratio. The new world-record VMMark benchmark result with 53.73 score while running 210 virtual machines proves that the HP ProLiant DL785 G6 is ideal for virtualization and consolidation environments. The industry x-86 workhorse beats the nearest 8-socket competitor by almost 58% on VMMark benchmark.

DL785 G6 shows increased scalability with the new AMD Opteron processors. As compared to the previous result on DL785 G5 (with 8 Quad-Core processors), the DL785 G6 (with 8 six-core processors) showed 70.2% increased performance. I have been asked this question many times – what makes DL785 G6 or other multi-processor ProLiant servers with the new six-core Opteron processors run more than 50% faster than the previous generation G5 servers with AMD quad core processors?

In addition to the virtualization acceleration technology like Rapid Virtualization indexing (RVI) , the newly introduced HT-Assit with six-core 8400 series AMD Opteron processors is a key contributor to the excellent performance of HP multi-processor servers including DL785 G6.

HT Assist helps reduces memory latency, improves HyperTransport bus efficiency and increases overall system performance in multi-processor systems by reducing the probe traffic and resolving probes quickly. It can eliminate the probe broadcasting in 8 out of 11 typical CPU-to-CPU transactions in a multi-processor system like DL785 G6.

These technologies help HP ProLiant servers achieve #1 virtualization performance results and near linear scaling as demonstrated on VMMark benchmark. The 4-processor DL585 G6 server shows 1.86 times scaling from 2-processor DL385 G6 server and the 8-processor DL785 G6 server shows 1.79 times scaling from 4-processor DL585 G6 server.

This unparalleled virtualization leadership is demonstrated in the AMD video featuring HP ProLiant DL785 G6 running 180 VMs! AMD will have this demo live at their booth (#1408) at VMWorld, August 31-September 3^rd 2009.

Please join us in the HP Booth (#2023) at VMWorld to see the ProLiant G6 servers, including DL785 G6, and a showcase of a wide variety of server, storage and networking virtualization solutions.

HP - VMworld Platinum Sponsor: virtualize your infrastructure

Kristie Popp — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 16:08:00 GMT

HP is showcasing our latest virtualization solutions at VMworld 2009 in San Francisco (Aug 31-Sept 3).

Not enough money to attend this dedicated virtualization event? Conference passes are available until August 30th at $1495 for a full conference pass. To register using the HP discount code, go to http://www.vmworld.com/registration.jspa and use code HPEB2009. One day passes are not available. The onsite registration fee is normally $1895. And hey - EMC is just giving a $250 discount!

Attendees in the HP booth will be invited to take the steps along the path to a creating a virtualized Infrastructure. Talk to our HP experts about cost savings with our storage and network solutions, made-for-virtualization G6 servers, and energy-efficient HP Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

Of course, everyone searches out all the tchotchkes right away. HP won’t disappoint with daily give-a-ways of t-shirts and Starbucks cards plus a $2,000 AmEx card drawing on Wednesday and instant prizes for those spotted wearing the HP t-shirt, and HP Netbooks!! Be sure to come by the HP booth and throw your name in the ring.

In addition to a Super Session Keynote by Ann Livermore, Mark Potter, and Robb Rasmussen (see the Tuesday morning session below), HP will drive a total of 9 additional sessions covering everything from VMware Site Recovery to virtualization-aware management and security. Abstracts for the sessions can be found here: https://vmworld2009.wingateweb.com/scheduler/catalog/catalog.jsp

vSphere 4 labs – featuring 4 blades racks and additional storage
Attendee email stations featuring HP Thin Clients and HP ProLiant servers
VCP Testing area – with HP desktops
Additional HP hardware can be found in the VMware booth, Intel Booth and AMD booth.
HP hardware on-stage or running a demo featured in Paul Maritz and Ann Livermore’s keynotes

We have lots more happening at VMworld – check out www.hp.com/go/vmworld for the latest updates. During the event, on this site, we will also share all the latest blogs and Twitter conversations and other social media sites where HP is creating buzz around the show.

Lots of activity at HPTF in Vegas, not just in the casinos! HP announced the new ExSO. Where does it fit into the virtualization landscape?

Kristie Popp — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 16:04:00 GMT

by Doug Dewerd

Lots of activity this week at HP Tech Forum in Las Vegas - and not just in the casinos! The announcement of the new Extreme Scale Out (ExSO) systems (SL160z G6, SL170z G6, SL2x170z G6, along with their cousin the DL1000 G6) appears to be a huge hit. The folks showing this in the HP booth have been busy non-stop demonstrating it to customers. Being a virtualization guy, I asked about where these servers fit into the virtualization landscape. Although it may be a bit early to tell definitively, the most likely usage would be in some sort of cloud computing infrastructure. Certainly these "skinless" high density, high performance systems should be popular with the High Performance Computing (HPC) crowd, but that type of use is usually not geared towards virtualization.

The ExSO servers are certified for use with Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, and VMware vSphere, so the foundation is there to be used in a virtual cloud infrastructure. The flexibility of the configurations for maximum memory, maximum storage, or maximum CPU density should satisfy the needs of cloud customers. I'm looking forward to see how these servers play out with virtualization in the extreme scale out world, but one thing I know is that they're sure to be a hit.

I'd love to hear what you think about cloud computing and virtualization. Where does virtualization fit in the cloud (which, of course depends on how you define "cloud"). Pros/cons/benefits/issues? Or is my head virtually in the clouds :-)

“Skinless” servers designed for extreme scale, built on standards

Kristie Popp — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 01:08:00 GMT

By John Gromala, director, product marketing, Industry Standard Servers, HP

Today, HP introduced our first addition to the HP ProLiant line since the 2001 introduction of blade servers with the new extreme scale ProLiant SL-family.

This addition marks a very important inflection point in the industry as more companies adopt very large scale data centers to support their businesses. We're talking about datacenters with thousands --to tens of thousands of nodes here --a segment of data center customer we're calling Extreme Scale-out (ExSO). These customers are the Web giants (search, Web 2.0, etc.) or more traditional businesses in the high-performance computing and enterprise realm. For both, IT is a key enabler of their business and is directly linked to the product or service they deliver to customers (whether it be delivering online applications or digital crash simulations).

Traditionally, these customers have been limited to one-off custom designs or proprietary offerings to meet their needs. Metrics like performance per watt per square foot are the name of the game for these guys. Every dollar spent for power, operations or server acquisition impacts business profitability.

Enter the new HP ProLiant SL6000 Scalable System, which uses a "skinless" systems architecture that replaces the traditional chassis with an extremely lightweight rail and tray design – all based on industry standards.

SL customers use 2U a z6000 chassis that leverages shared power and fans to maximize energy efficiencies and can mix-and-match between 3 new SL servers optimized for very specific ExSO workloads:

1. · HP ProLiant SL2x170z G6 delivers high-density compute with two servers in each 1U tray for highly dense applications such as high-performance computing and web front-end applications.

2. · HP ProLiant SL160z G6 delivers increased memory with 18 dual, in-line memory module (DIMM) slots and up to two peripheral component interconnect (PCI) slots, making it ideal for large memory-cache apps.

3. · HP ProLiant SL170z G6 delivers the greatest storage capacity with up to six large form-factor Serial ATA (SATA) or serial-attached SCSI (SAS) hard drives. The server is ideal for large storage applications such as web search and database applications.

These new ProLiant SL servers join HP’s existing ProLiant DL (rack), ML (tower) and BL (blade) servers. Learn more about ProLiant Servers here.

Jump right to information on the HP’s new Extreme Scale-out (ExSO) portfolio here.

Read more about HP's ExSO portfolio in today's press release here.

Taking the complexity out of virtualization

s_mathur — Fri, 29 May 2009 01:28:00 GMT

By Paul Gottsegen, VP, Integrated Marketing, Enterprise Servers & Storage, HP.

Today, we introduced a new set of Virtualization Bundles aimed taking some of the complexity --and cost - out of deploying virtualization for our SMB customers. HP's bundled servers, software, networking and management, along with VMware virtualization software to deliver a complete virtualization starter kit for SMBs. These bundles help our SMBs customers take advantage of all the business benefits virtualization has to offer more easily, enabling them to stretch their return on every IT dollar.

But the big deal isn't just the bundling. The big deal for SMBs is that through the use of technology from recently acquired LeftHand Networks, HP can ensure that application requirements are met and administrators can use existing resources to cost-effectively deploy shared storage. The LeftHand technology transforms the disk drives on the servers themselves, in to shared storage across all the virtualized servers, ensuring customer's virtualized applications stay online if a server goes down.

Visit HP.com to learn more about the new HP Virtualization Bundles: www.hp.com/go/virtkit

Read the media advisory on the new HP Virtualization Bundles here

Virtualization Never Looked So Good

R_Palmer — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 21:33:00 GMT

Virtualization has become a mainstay, even a business imperative, within most data centers today. Today, every server manufacturer is claiming leadership in virtualization platforms, so the real question you need to ask is, "Why HP?" Well, let me give you a few of the key reasons why HP is the right choice for your trusted advisor when it comes to virtualization.

Whether it's for server consolidation, workload balancing or security and disaster recovery purposes, the dramatic growth of virtual machine implementation is mind boggling. This is not necessarily coupled to the comfort level of IT managers though, as there continues to be a disarray of management tools and interfaces required to manage both physical and virtual machines. HP has taken this challenge head on with our new Insight Control Environment (ICE) which gives you a single pane of glass to monitor and manage both your virtual machines and physical machines simultaneously.

On November 17^th, we introduced the new HP ProLiant DL385 G5p server based on the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron 2300 processor (code named "Shanghai"). The HP ProLiant DL385 G5p is designed and optimized specifically for virtualization and consolidation environments. In fact, we looked at every facet of the product in our development effort with a few key principles in mind:

Provide a strong investment protection value for existing AMD Opteron customers
Improve the overall performance in the same, or lower, power envelope
Optimize the virtualization performance
Increase the number of virtual machines on a single platform
Simplify and improve the security of deploying of virtual machines

The new DL385 G5p is now available, having met and exceeded these objectives, arriving ahead of schedule. With the new 45nm "Shanghai" processor, with a 6MB L3 cache, we have achieved higher performance and maintained Socket F compatibility, yet at a substantially lower power envelope. HP, unlike some of our competitors, has designed the DL385 G5p to provide our customers with the flexibility to choose between single processor or dual processor configurations, without sacrificing any of the improvements offered by Shanghai. We have optimized the real estate inside of the 2U chassis to deliver twice the memory, twice the NICs and 6 times the storage capacity as the previous generation DL385. With 16 DDR2 DIMM sockets, you can reach 128GB of memory using 8GB high performance DIMMs. This allows for significantly more virtual machines to run on this single platform.

In addition, with virtual machine deployment, networking capabilities are critical. In the new DL385 G5p, we integrated 4 gigabit Ethernet ports to free up the PCI-Express slots to meet your flexible design requirements and increase the bandwidth for the virtual machines running on the server. The flexibility of the PCI bus slot configuration is another key benefit of the HP ProLiant DL385 G5p. With up to 6 PCI-e slots, additional networking, storage and application specific I/O adapters can be added to improve the virtualization experience. There are many customers who require legacy PCI-X controller support and some that are looking for the latest and greatest x16 PCI-e controller support. In the DL385 G5p, we have given those customers the flexibility to configure the PCI bus slots to meet their unique application and environment needs.

Storage performance is a key differentiator in the market today, even more so in virtualization environments. That's why we increased the internal disk storage on the DL385 G5p to 16 2.5" SAS or SATA disk drives; or 6 3.5" SAS or SATA disk drives. This provides up to 6TB of internal disk storage to be shared between the virtual machines with improved performance when compared to external shared disk solutions. By bringing the disks closer to the processors, the performance bandwidth issues are minimized and the overall performance of the storage is improved.

This server is built with efficiency in mind! The HP ProLiant DL385 G5p helps save on energy costs with the industry's highest efficiency power supplies that currently power the complete portfolio of HP ProLiant servers. Finally, with the internal USB slot, you can utilize an iHypervisor on a USB key that allows you to deploy virtual machines securely and easily.

In closing I'd like to quote Paul Gottsegen, VP of Marketing for HP's Industry Standard Servers division, from a recent interview:

"Customers can drive down costs through new "Shanghai"-based HP ProLiant servers that set new levels of power efficiency and performance. HP has experienced unparalleled success over the past four years working with AMD in bringing AMD Opteron processor-based platforms to customers of all sizes. Early results indicate "Shanghai" is a winner."

HP continues to lead the market in delivering more ProLiant servers featuring AMD Opteron processors than any other system manufacturer. In fact, HP has shipped over four times more than IBM and 1.5 times more than Dell (IDC- Q208 Server Tracker, Oct.08). Have confidence in choosing HP as your trusted advisor as we continue to set the bar for performance, energy efficiency and optimization in virtualization environments.

For more information click here on the DL385 G5P server link, or listen to the replay from Paul Gottsegen at the AMD Shanghai launch event on November 13^th.

VMworld Views: Day 2

dstrain — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 03:08:00 GMT

By the second full day of VMworld, I noticed two discernable themes (I'm sure most of you who are at VMworld probably noticed them days ago!).

VMware is really playing up the customer focus. The first thing you notice about the "décor" of VMworld is that there are all of these cartoons of real world customers. Being an HP person, I have to read each name and each company to see if they are HP customers - I'm happy to report that at least 50% of them are ones that I know are HP customers. However, the customer focus goes beyond the cartoons. There are customer testimonials before the general sessions (as well as an arguably more amusing customer video before the HP keynote). I thought the ultimate was that they even brought a customer out on stage to do a demonstration of a new technology. Note to VMware: that is way more interesting to watch than an engineer dragged out of a lab.

The other thing is VMware's focus on "Virtual Datacenter OS" or VDC-OS for short. This is VMware's new way of describing what most customers have finally learned to call "VMware Infrastructure". I know people are often resistant to change - I myself went kicking and screaming from the old "Virtual Infrastructure Node" naming to "VMware Infrastructure", but I attribute that to being old (just ask my kids). In talking to people today, I just don't think that they are buying into VDC-OS, though. In many ways, calling it an OS is selling the technology short. It is very different from what I would consider an operating system, and it has so many other centralized features that one wouldn't expect to see in an OS (certainly OS vendors brand features of that ilk something other than an OS).

One more day of the conference, but it will likely start off slow since people will be at the partying late tonight.

From VMworld....

dstrain — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:48:00 GMT

As I attend this year’s VMworld, it’s amazing to think how much has changed since the first VMworld only four years ago. At that time, only a relatively small group of loyal techies even knew what virtualization was. The techies are still here supporting VMware and virtualization, but now many more people are more focused on the business implications of virtualization in their organizations. At the solutions area four years ago, there were maybe a couple of dozen booths, some big companies – HP, IBM, others – and a handful of software vendors who were taking a big chance by supporting virtualization. Now, just about every vendor of server, storage, client, networking, and other hardware is here. Add to that the scads of software partners, reseller partners, consultants, and even VMware competitors, and you have huge exposition.VMware has also changed substantially in those four short years, too. At that time, it seemed almost like a family business with Diane Green and Mendel Rosenblum knowing all the VMware employees and even most of the customers. Today, Paul Maritz seems to have the support of the VMware employees, and with today’s general session, he has also won over the VMworld audience. One other major thing that has visibly changed about VMware – they have gone from having the x86 virtualization market almost to themselves to a company that has to both compete with their products and sustain the loyalty of their customers. With Paul Maritz leading that charge, VMware recognizes their new competitive mission, and they are ready for battle.

HP Tops TBR Customer Satisfaction Survey

Gordon Casey — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:33:00 GMT

Technology Business Research (TBR) recently released its 2Q-2008 x86 Server Customer Satisfaction Study results, and the news is EXCELLENT for HP this quarter.

HP ProLiant achieved the #1 ranking in both the Weighted Satisfaction Index (WSI) and the Overall Satisfaction Rating. The WSI ranking is a weighted customer satisfaction score that considers what is important and how satisfied customers are with each area of customer satisfaction. The overall satisfaction rating is the response from customers when asked “Overall how satisfied are you?”. Together, these two indicators provide us with a quick snapshot of customer satisfaction for each vendor surveyed.

With these results, HP now has sole leadership and no longer shares the #1 position with the competition. HP was the only competitor to demonstrate gains in every category measured by TBR (9 in total). Specifically, the results in Hardware Quality/Reliability, Management Tools, Server Value and Parts Availability were significantly higher than industry averages. TBR identified these four (4) areas as providing a competitive advantage for HP over its competition. HP also scored higher than industry averages in the all-important category of Overall Satisfaction. According to TBR, customer expectations continue to rise as customers seek out new technology advances to counter serious datacenter challenges. Customers are also searching for much more than attractive purchase pricing. Server value incorporates all expectations, incorporating everything from reliability to technical support and management tools. The influence of relationship quality also figures strongly into customers’ perceptions of value. Our focus on delivering the products customers want continues to pay off. For nine (9) consecutive reporting periods, HP has remained ahead of the competition as the brand perceived as most differentiated. Customers continue to recognize the value HP delivers in the ProLiant brand.

And it gets better! Customer Loyalty is another excellent category for HP. For the last seven (7) quarters, HP has held the #1 position in customer loyalty. HP scores in customer loyalty for the last two quarters are the highest scores on record (since 2Q-2005).

One does not have to look far when looking for reasons why HP dominates customer loyalty. Customers recognize differentiated value. One example is in the area of server management. TBR reports that HP customers place management higher in priority than customers of our competitors. Customers expect more from HP and the results show HP has delivered. HP Systems Insight Manager (HP SIM) is a single software tool providing a consolidated view of everything you need to manage your server and it comes with every HP server. TBR also measures customer expectations, customer priorities, and how well a company is meeting those needs. According to the survey, customers consider hardware quality, parts availability, and overall value as the three most important attributes of a server vendor. For customer expectations, scores show HP is meeting customer expectations in every measurable category, and, more importantly, HP ranks #1 in all three areas. HP is focused on these attributes and also sees them as critical to our customers’ success. We continue to drive improvements in these areas by working with our developers, partners, and suppliers to drive quality into every server. As an example, by designing servers focused on customer self repair (CSR) customers have the flexibility to schedule and make a repair at their convenience. Where do we go next? These results have set the bar higher and clearly identified the market leader. Our challenge moving forward will be to accelerate the pace and deliver on the expectations of our customers. We’re committed to doing this – and it is evidenced in our offerings from the last few quarters. HP is listening to customers and delivering servers that reduce power consumption, expands virtualization, and enable success in the most demanding and complex computing environments. I welcome your comments – tell me how we are doing. Are there areas we can improve? Let me know – HP’s focus is on the customer and we need your input.

HP’s Virtual Math: 1+1+1=#1.

aimeeschoaf — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 15:15:00 GMT

By Doug Strain

What makes a leader in virtualization? Is it performance? Is it experience and marketshare? Is it being named as #1 in manageability for the leading virtualization platform? Or, in the new math that really measures the strength of a virtualization leader, maybe it is much more than the sum of its parts. This week, VMware released new VMmark results.This benchmark calculates top performance of x86 servers. With this, the HP ProLiant DL585 G5 ranks at the top of 16-core servers, beating out similarly configured Dell and IBM machines. The DL585 result is 4 percent higher than the Dell PowerEdge 905 and 12 percent higher than the IBM System x3850 M2.

HP servers are now #1 in:

VMware performance
VMware market share
VMware integration with systems management tools

What does this mean for customers looking to leverage virtualization technologies? HP has the broadest range of servers and storage certified for VMware.

HP has the only pre-integrated solution that integrates with core server management tools that gets customers up and running quickly, and simplifies management dramatically
HP has the most solid managed infrastructure for unified physical and virtual machines
HP was first to market with innovative technologies like ProLiant Virtual Console
HP is the only vendor to have blanket integrated hypervisor story spanning VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft
HP uniquely offers the broadest range of desktop virtualization offerings spanning VDI, Blade PCs and Workstations, and thin clients
HP is a leading partner for VMware, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft

Interested in more? Contact me, Doug Strain, at doug.strain@hp.com.