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As IT managers begin to plan their next wave of server deployments, they have a broad spectrum of technologies from which to make their selections. In a world where businesses are increasingly reliant upon IT support for flexible computing requirements, companies are looking to suppliers that can bring server solutions together with the least amount of customization - and the greatest amount of flexibility - in terms of products, services, and delivery of the systems themselves.
These customers are looking to large suppliers, such as HP, to provide IT that is responsive to their datacenter requirements.
HP's portfolio of server products spans the entire range from low-cost volume servers to high-end scalable servers. It is designed to support HP's business customers across a wide variety of workloads because each workload requires a mix of hardware capability and software technologies to provide the right solution. HP provides scale-out solutions that can be deployed in server farms, clusters and grids, servers for technical and commercial workloads. HP also provides scale-up solutions to support data-intense and business-critical workloads.
HP's server products provide both flexibility and choice because the server platforms themselves are combined with operating systems, other system software, and application software to support many types of workloads, and they are managed by
HP's System Insight Manager (SIM) and OpenView system-management software. Today, HP supports Unix, Linux, and Microsoft Windows on its Integrity line of Itanium-based servers - and Microsoft Windows and Linux on its ProLiant line of x86 servers. In the near future, two more mission-critical operating systems, OpenVMS and NonStop Kernel (NSK), will also be available on Integrity servers. This broad support for operating systems has led to the support for many ISV packaged applications, in addition to tools for building business-specific custom applications that run on these operating environments.
HP's acknowledgement of the diversity of customer requirements in the marketplace has resulted in a rich set of server solutions to address the full range of customer needs. Spanning this broad base of technology choices is HP's Adaptive Enterprise initiative, which allows a common set of management and provisioning tools to be leveraged across the broad spectrum of platform and operating system options.
The server landscape is changing. Faced with limited IT budgets in recent years, IT managers have learned how to consolidate workloads onto scalable servers - and how to deploy new workloads on racks of low-cost volume servers. In the improving economy, system plans that were delayed and deferred are once again being evaluated. IT managers are considering ways to increase current capacity while creating new designs for IT infrastructure that can be assembled from standard building blocks, with the aim of reducing acquisition costs, deployment costs, and operational costs over time.
Scale-out Strategies
Indeed, constrained IT spending inspired many IT managers to approach the task of capacity planning in entirely new ways. During the downturn, volume servers (i.e., servers priced less than $25,000) were the fastest growing segment of the server market, adding capacity in small form factors that could be linked together into scale-out configurations. These scale-out configurations became popular for Web serving, IT infrastructure (e.g., network support, file/print), collaborative software (e.g., email, groupware), and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. Volume servers now form the basis of increasingly powerful computing systems, whether used alone or in clusters. Processors with new capabilities, including 32-bit x86 processors, 32/64-bit x86 (x86-64) processors, and 64-bit Itanium processors, are bringing more power and performance to smaller form-factors, including 2-way and 4-way rack-optimized servers and blade servers.
Given the lessons learned during the downturn about building infrastructure with volume servers priced less than $25,000, IT managers are looking to standards-based computing as a means to reduce acquisition costs and, through simplification of IT infrastructure, to reduce operating costs over the long term. By leveraging industry-standard components (i.e., processors, memory, I/O interconnects), server vendors can share in economies of scale, thus reducing their own manufacturing costs as well as the costs of server platforms for their customers.
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