|
Every professional mechanic or home handyman knows that you need the "right" tool to do the job. This entails making an initial investment to ensure that you have a complete set of screwdrivers, both slotted and Phillips-head, and a complete set of wrenches, both open-end and box-end, standard and metric, to be sure that you can handle any requirement, as well as a set of hex keys or Allen wrenches, in addition to any number of power tools. Sure, you can use the proverbial "adjustable" wrench that can be sized to fit any purpose (you know - One-Size-Fits-All, just not very well). However, this type of tool is known to slip, or even strip the threads of the hard-to-find expensive bolt, causing you to make an unexpected investment in both time and money. As an old familiar saying goes, "you can pay me now, or pay me later." Unfortunately, "pay me later" often turns out to be a larger figure!
Having the right set of tools is equally important in the data center of any organization large or small. As we have learned over the past few years, the total cost of ownership (TCO) of an I.T. infrastructure entails much more than simply the acquisition cost. Data centers around the world have become choked with inefficient and poorly managed servers, storage, and administrative resources. In many cases, servers are only being used at 15% to 20% of their capacity. Unfortunately, the organization must account for 100% of the electrical power required to run these resources and cool the data center, as well as 100% of the floor space occupied by a virtual plethora of under-utilized hardware. In order to reduce the TCO of the data center, many enterprises have engaged in programs to consolidate their application set on the latest multi-socket, multi-core processors. The goal: virtualizing multiple applications on a single platform to utilize available processing resources more fully. Some of these applications are CPU-intensive; others are I/O-intensive. Each requires a specific set of configuration parameters in terms of the number of processors, the amount of memory, the number of I/O ports, etc.
As with the professional mechanic, one server size does not necessarily fit all application environments. One large business may be focusing on a rack or blade environment for their data center, a different architecture for their branch offices, and a tower format for their remote requirements, all of them scalable to a different degree. The CPU-intensive applications may be looking for multi-socket nodes, while the virtualization environments could require greater memory scalability. In order to simplify an application rollout, the organization needs to find an I.T. vendor that not only offers a wide variety of server options, but also offers a common interface that will support all of them. HP already announced a wide variety of servers based upon Intel's newest architecture, the Xeon 5500 Series Processor. They have now followed that up with the first announcement of support for Six-Core AMD OpteronT Processors. To learn more about how HP can reduce the TCO of your data center with scalable, energy-efficient options that can consolidate and virtualize your environment, please read on.
|
