Justin Vashisht This week I am attending the 2013 HP Global Partner Conference here in Vegas for the first time. Not surprisingly at the first session, on the very first day HP announced to a room gathered full of press, bloggers, and executives on some new products under the ESSN space. For those that don’t know, ESSN stands for HP’s Enterprise Servers, Storage, and Network. This group, headed by David Donatelli has been on the cutting edge for years. Thanks to Dave we have seen things like the 3Par acquisition, Virtual Connect, Gen8 servers, and HP Networking innovations.
David Scott – former 3Par CEO, now head of HP Storage speaking about the new HP Storage initiatives.
So, lets do a short take of some of the announcements that really interested me this morning:
BLADESYSTEM
HP seems to be very committed to the current 3000/7000 chassis architecture. I have had nothing but great experience in the reliability and stability of every BladeSystem we have deployed. Today HP has announced that they have taken the current system, locked the Electrical Engineering in the room and squeezed out some record setting performance never seen before in a Blade chassis. Here are some of the improvements:
- New HP “PLATINUM” series c3000 and c7000 chassis.
- Same familiar look and feel, ability to use existing hardware.
- 40gb downlinks to the blade servers., this is huge for virtualized shops! (First in Industry)
- 40% more overall available bandwidth
- Location intelligence and awareness in the data center with advanced power discovery features. (First in Industry)
- Virtual Connect 4.0 firmware – end to end network integration with real time monitoring.
- Industries first virtualized 3D graphics performance for blade servers.
- Up to 4x user density at 60% lower cost.
STORAGE
David Scott, former CEO of 3Par and now head of Storage at HP introduced a few new initiatives as well. I think the StoreVirtual 4530 and 4730 are going to be huge in the SMB space. It is great to have a complete purpose built, unified system that I can get running in my virtual infrastructure in less than a day. HP has already put together the right components and software so I don’t have to experiment on my clients. David also mentioned that fact that these systems are built form the ground up for resilience. This translates into zero downtime software upgrades and seamless scalability.
- HP StoreSystem – This combines the StoreServ and StoreOnce products into one converged solution. Now, your storage and backup infrastructure will become as one. This takes management and performance to new heights. To me, this is something that should interest Cloud Providers and Enterprise level customers.
- HP StoreVirtual 4530 and 4730 – based on Lefthand OS version 10.5.
- Built for midrange – based on Gen8 optimized servers. 64GB RAM, SmartArray with an astounding 2GB FBWC!
- 4x10gb iSCSI connectivity
- 4530 supports 12 LFF drives, 4730 support 25 SFF drives.
BRING YOUR OWN DEVICE (BYOD)
This one caught me off guard as I had no idea HP was going to enter the BYOD market. I still have to do more research on this system. Having implemented solutions from Airwatch and Good Messaging I need to see the feature set HP is bringing to the table.
HP’s solutions allows IT to onboard, provision and monitor users, devices and traffic on the network whether the user is an employee, contractor or guest and the device is connected wired or wirelessly. BYOD identity based access offers a comprehensive solution which includes single policy enforcement and converged network management across wired and wireless environments. Unified BYOD monitoring further enables you to optimize resource allocation and comply with regulatory requirements. This is obviously huge for the financial firms.
NETWORKING
There were several announcements but ignored all of them since I was fixated on the HP 830 Unified/WLAN Switch 🙂 This switch eliminates the need to purchase up to 50 percent of traditional network access devices, including separate switches and controllers, while supporting up to 1,000 wireless devices. This is one of those “why didn’t I think of this” products. Converging wireless capabilities into my access layer switches is a no brainer. Less management, less devices to worry about, less software programs, and less time since I’m don’t have to deploy separate product sets.
There were many more products announced. Follow my fellow bloggers @vmugonline, @ninabuik,, @johnobeto, and @jakeludington for additonal coverage. Will provide more updates from Vegas as they come down the wire.
-Justin Vashisht (3cvguy)
