Reality Check: Server Insights

Lower energy costs and safeguard your HP ProLiant servers from catastrophic events

Kristie Popp — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 23:16:00 GMT

By Mark Lackey,

Product Manager, Insight Control power management

HP is introducing Data Center Power Control, the newest power management feature of Insight Control. I want to share a cool story about how this product was invented after a nearly catastrophic event at an HP site. We used our experience to innovate and make sure your company doesn’t go through a similar experience.

Last summer, a water chiller failed in the computer room at an HP site. As a result, our engineers had to run around manually turning off the systems before they crashed. We were fortunate because the right people were in place to do this as it happened, even though it was a manual process. That got our engineers thinking… if only there were a way to set pre-defined policies to automatically shutdown servers or lower the power state during catastrophic events. Today that’s a reality because of HP Data Center Power Control. In a nutshell, you set the guidelines in advance so that you can extend the ride-through time for mission critical apps by reducing power usage by non-critical workloads when there’s a failure.

Another important perk is the ability to lower your energy bill by taking control of your power usage during peak times. Imagine the utility company contacts you and says you need to shed 50 KWh of power today from 3 – 6 PM. That’s no problem with HP Data Center Power Control. You can also drop power usage during peak or coincident peak times. This helps you drive your infrastructure into a more efficient operating range. It’s also good for scheduled maintenance. At the given maintenance time, you can shed power to make sure certain servers are powered down. The best part is that it’s as easy as pressing a button.

What are your thoughts on Data Center Power Control? Has your company had a catastrophic failure or needed to shed power quickly where this capability would have been useful?

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’s recently introduced ProLiant SL “skinless” server line snags top spot in performance per watt benchmark

Kristie Popp — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:48:00 GMT

By Dave Peterson, group manager, Industry Standard Servers Product Marketing
HP’s recently introduced ProLiant SL “skinless” server line snags top spot in performance per watt benchmark

Earlier this year at the 2009 World Championships Jamaican runner Usain Bolt sprinted into history as he became the first man ever to hold the 100m and 200m world and Olympic titles at the same time. In the process he shattered a few world records, shaving 0.11 seconds off the record he had previously set in Beijing at the 2008 Olympics. One thing I find interesting about this man who is clearly the fastest man in the world is that he says he doesn’t run to set world records.

Though I would not want to directly compare the almost superhuman feats of Usain Bolt to the work done by the HP ProLiant engineering teams, I believe there is a parallel here. Earlier this year HP released our Extreme Scale-out (ExSO) x86 server line, dubbed “SL” for “scalable line” and often referred to as “skinless” for it’s stripped down, light-weight design.

One of the key design goals for ProLiant SL was to improve power efficiency as much as possible. When you have thousands of servers running scale-out workloads day in and day out, squeezing every cycle out of those servers for the lowest possible wattage is incredibly important from an OpEx (energy cost) perspective. Thus HP’s engineers set about to improve performance per watt on this platform so our customers could have the most cost effective scale-out platform possible. They didn’t set as their goal to create a new world record. But by focusing on the challenge of saving our customers money on energy, these amazing HP engineers have also shattered a world record.

The just-published SPECpower_ssj2008* benchmark result for HP ProLiant SL2x170z G6 is the best ever SPECpower_ssj2008 result of 2316 overall ssj_ops/watt*. That is 3.81% better than the previous record held by IBM*. As a comparison, Usain Bolt’s 9.58 second 100m world record was 1.34% faster than his closest competitor, Tyson Gay, who clocked a 9.71. If Bolt had run 3.81% faster than Tyson Gay in that particular race, his world record would have been 9.34 seconds, an unheard of time for 100 meters.

I’d love to hear your thoughts – what could you do with the money saved from improving your performance per watt by running HP ProLiant servers?

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SPEC® and the benchmark name SPECpower_ssj® are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Benchmark results stated above reflect results published on www.spec.org as of 11/04/2009. For the latest benchmark results, visi http://www.spec.org/power_ssj2008/

How will the HP Data Center Smart Grid solve the #1 data center constraint?

Kristie Popp — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:37:00 GMT

By Steve Cumings, Director, SCI Marketing, ISS

How will the HP Center Smart Grid solve the #1 data center constraint?

As we talk to customers around the world, they continue to tell us their #1 challenge is power and cooling. The problem is this: When a power or cooling limit is reached in the data center, it can slow or halt deployment of additional IT. And that in turn can slow business growth.

In many cases though, these limits are artificial; the data center has enough power or cooling capacity, but it’s stranded in silos and isn’t actively monitored or managed for most effective use The solution is to approach the data center holistically, and integrate the data center energy elements so they can work at maximum effectiveness. HP’s Data Center Smart Grid will do exactly that, and extend our existing portfolio to actively monitor and manage IT.

Result? A data center where energy capacity is understood, is flexibly architected, and is delivered where it’s needed – in exactly the amount that’s needed. When IT and facilities are actively managed and linked, they can work in concert: the IT working at maximum power efficiency, and the facility delivering exactly the right amount of support. This not only adds data center capacity and thus postpone capital expense, but allows maximum energy savings – giving customers faster ROI, and the opportunity to align with utility and green initiatives.

Time to connect datacenter IT with facilities and unleash their trapped energy capacity

Kristie Popp — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:21:00 GMT

By: Doug Oathout, VP of Green IT Enterprise Storage and Servers

Time to connect datacenter IT with facilities and unleash their trapped energy capacity

IT organizations have been building infrastructure in silos for twenty years; the network administrator builds the interconnects, the storage administrator makes sure the data is accessible and secure, the servers administrator monitors application and server availability and the facilities manager makes sure everything is getting enough power and cooling to run safely. This all sounds good until you run out of space, power and above all money, now what do you do?

Enter HP Data Center Smart Grid

The HP Data Center Smart Grid creates an intelligent, energy-aware environment across IT and facilities to optimize and adapt energy use. It collects and communicates thousands of power and cooling measurements across IT systems and facilities in real-time to give customers more efficient insight and control over energy use. This lets customers support business growth by hosting more applications and services within the same energy footprint, thereby making more effective use of existing capacity and capital investments.

Key benefits:

Increases the capacity and useful lifespan of the data center, postponing or eliminating additional capital expense
Reduces operating costs required to power and cooling IT systems
Improves reliability by optimizing power and cooling efficiency of IT and facilities
Provides insight and control over energy costs and environmental impact

HP Data Center Smart Grid works in concert with the HP Infrastructure Operating Environment, HP Flex Fabric, and HP Virtual Resource Pools for continual optimization of your Converged Infrastructure.

Oracle Open World 2009 as seen by industry expert blogger John Obeto

Kristie Popp — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:29:00 GMT

Greetings,

I had the opportunity of meeting with many interesting folks last week at Oracle Open World 2009. Man, what a show – people in all over the place, rushing to sessions, buzz going on everywhere. Even at breakfast or lunch where ever you went… “HP” “Oracle” "Sun" “Dell” “Pythian” words rang above the conversation hums. I had the chance to meet up many times with industry expert blogger John Obeto from AbsolutelyWindows and TechVirtuoso. I’ld like to share some of his outtakes from OOW09.

Here is a short video of John at the show:

http://bit.ly/oow-obeto

And check out his blogs:

Oracle OpenWorld Keynotes

Blade & Storage Evolution in the Next-generation data center

Verizon's deploys PeopleSoft w/ HP

HP has solutions for SMBs on Oracle?

HP's Kim Vayda welcomes everyone to Oracle OpenWorld 2009

OpenWorld Session: HP Infrastructure Strategies for Oracle Business Intelligence

Modernizing Applications for MIUR

HP videos from around Oracle Open World 2009

Kristie Popp — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:48:00 GMT

Here is the first batch from videos around Oracle Open World. Check back; we will be adding more, like the booth tour and a brief note on the case study from Intaly's Ministry of Education infrastructure modernization.

Oracle Open World: Intro to HP at the show with Kim Vayda, see all that’s going on! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeA5UFICUOo

Oracle Open World: ProCurve Lifetime Warranty http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8fyc--kilg

HP's Integrity Blade Servers with HP Integrity expert Trace Mitchell http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqxeFgjriWA at Oracle Open World

Small database to any tested sized solution, low TCO scale up or out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rm4qw5iuee8 w/ HP’s Jay Workman

HP Z600 Workstation w/ modular approach, easy power supply http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7NKyR_GH3A

HP Skyroom cool collaboration sftwr w/ Walker Dollahon http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jZUo1aK8TY

Check out the hardware at HP’s booth w/ Norman Morales http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm-RXUnKUXs

HP BladeSystem Strategist Richard Fichera just out of a futures sessions at Oracle Open World http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm-RXUnKUXs

No more ‘hoping your room is cool’ Oracle Open World w HP BladeSystem Strategist Richard Fichera http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wbM3RB4elI

Oracle Open World: HP Enterprise Services http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEFjvlbXLd4

More performance, lower TCO and unmatched scalability with HP ProLiant G6 servers and Oracle 11g

anand.akela@hp.com — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:48:00 GMT

Businesses are under tremendous pressure to improve efficiency of their existing infrastructures, meet future growth and reduce overhead. They must cut power and operational costs while reducing server and database sprawl. Add in the need to increase compute power, memory and I/O capacity to meet operational demands and the pressure becomes game changing.

In order to get datacenter management, operational and, therefore, economic efficiency, consolidating databases on a scale-up x86 server is becoming an attractive option for customers. For example, HP ProLiant DL785 G6 servers can scale up to support very large workloads as well as consolidation of multiple database instances onto a single server still leaving headroom for future growth.

Customers looking to migrate their oracle database applications from large legacy servers with very high operational cost, find Oracle database deployments on HP ProLiant multi-processor servers running Linux or Solaris very attractive. These multi-processor ProLiant servers provide a great scale-up deployment platform for both Business Intelligence and Online Transaction processing applications deployed on the databases.

Businesses strive to fully automate manufacturing, inventory, supply chain management, and customer billing running simple to complex business applications on the top of a database, such as Oracle 11g. The SPECjAppServer 2004 benchmark emulates information flow among an automotive dealership, manufacturing, supply chain management, and an order/inventory system and can be a very good indicator of server performance for these workloads.

As you can see in the Oracle press release at Oracle Open World 2009 earlier today, HP ProLiant DL785 G6 running Oracle® Fusion Middleware and Oracle database 11g delivers World Record Single-Node result with SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark. This demonstrates that that HP ProLiant DL785 G6 is a superb platform for deploying JAVA/J2EE based business application running on Oracle database.

Oracle Open World 2009, the world's largest information technology event dedicated to helping enterprises understand how to harness the power of information, already started in Moscone Center, San Francisco, this morning.

Please feel free to stop by and check out the award-winning HP ProLiant DL785 G6 and many other HP solutions at #HP booth #1301. I will be at the HP ProLiant DL785 G6 booth on all three days of the Oracle Open World 2009 and looking forward to learning, answering questions and meeting with a lot of customers and partners.

HP Oracle Open World Fun Facts Twitter Contest

Kristie Popp — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:49:00 GMT

During Oracle Open World 2009, we invite you to participate in HP’s OOW09 Fun Facts Contest on Twitter.

Beginning Monday, Oct. 12^th and Wednesday, Oct. 14^th, we’ll be giving away one copy of the new HP SkyRoom collaboration software to the first person to correctly answer our HP OOW09 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 and @BladeNews

· Step 2: Be on the lookout for HP and Oracle related Fun Facts posted by those Twitter accounts and take note!

· Step 3: Sometime between the hours of 9am-5pm PT Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday during the show, both of those accounts (@ProLiant and @BladeNews) will post an HP/Oracle Fun Fact trivia contest question, giving you 2 chances to win each day!

· Step 4: Be the first person to tweet a reply with the correct answer to whomever asked the Fun Fact question (@ProLiant or @BladeNews) and you will win an HP SkyRoom software package. We’ll announce winners via Twitter. Upon announcement, winners will receive a direct message from our HP tweeters (@ProLiant or @BladeNews) to determine whether you’d like to pick up the software at OOW09 or have us ship it directly to you within the US.

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

California dreamin’ - Oracle OpenWorld is coming up next week in San Francisco

Kristie Popp — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 16:45:00 GMT

All the leaves are brown…..and the sky is gray….. I am California dreamin’ because Oracle OpenWorld is coming up next week in San Francisco! All of us at HP are really excited about being the Marquee sponsor at Oracle OpenWorld once again – it gives us a great opportunity to show you how many great solutions HP and Oracle have developed to help you unleash the full potential of your IT.

Be sure to see everything that we have to offer at the show. Ann Livermore, Executive VP, HP Enterprise Business, will be speaking onstage Monday morning, October 12 - just after Charles Phillips and Safra Catz. HP has some great product and solution demonstrations in our booth - #1301 in Moscone South. Take a booth tour, let HP help you assess your business, get an HP t-shirt and register for other great prizes. Come check out the new HP Skyroom – online collaboration desktop software – both in HP and Intel’s booths. For all of the HP activities at the event, check out our website at www.hp.com/go/oracle/oow2009.

All of this together is to help you – our customers - unleash the full potential of your IT – converge your infrastructure, modernize your environment, become more efficient. Using technology to better your business outcomes.

I will be checking in along the way next week to share the event's happenings. See you next week!

Kim Vayda,
HP Oracle Global Alliance

Are you headed to Oracle Open World?

Kristie Popp — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 02:07:00 GMT

Are you headed to Oracle Open World? Please be sure to spend some time with HP. Our big topics this year are about Infrastructure Convergence and Modernization while increasing efficiency. By 2010, more than 1/3 of CEOs and CIOs say their current data center will be unable to meet growing demands. All with less money.

HP servers, storage, software and services can provide*:

• Risk Adjusted Return on Investment (RA ROI) of 229%

• Return on Investment (ROI) of 271%

• Net Present Value (NPV) savings of $874,521

• Internal Rate of Return (IRR) of 153%

• Payback period of 3 months

*Alinean Case Study WP Sept 2009

Here’s the full list of HP sessions below, or print this version here: (Please visit the site to view this media) Hope to see you there!

Can’t travel? We will be there with industry bloggers. Stay tuned to www.hp.com/go/oracle/oow2009, we will be updating with the latest buzz from the show. Also, follow @ProLiant and @BladeNews on Twitter.

SESSION	SESSION TITLE	SPEAKER	DATE/TIME	LOCATION
	Oracle E-Business Suite 12, SOA, and Oracle Application Integration Architecture	Brian Bent, EDS, an HP company; Charlene Huang, Symantec	Monday	Moscone West L2
S312324			10/12/2009	Room 2012
			11:30 - 12:30
	EDS Automates Infrastructure Outsourcing Provisioning Processes with Oracle Identity Manager	Urooj Burney, EDS, an HP company; Doug Young, EDS, an HP company	Monday	Marriott Hotel
S312646			10/12/2009	Salon 2
			14:30 - 15:30
	Blades and Storage Evolution for the Next-Generation Data Center	Richard Fichera, HP	Monday	Moscone South
S312322			10/12/2009	Room 302
			16:00 - 17:00
S309026	SQL Analytical Functions in the Real World	Ben Bor, Hewlett-Packard Australia	Tuesday	Marriott Hotel
			10/13/2009	Salon 1
			11:30 - 12:30
	Verizon Deploys PeopleSoft Enterprise and Oracle RAC on Blade Servers and Linux	Michael Blake, Verizon; Michael St-Jean, Hewlett-Packard Company	Tuesday	Moscone West L3
S308740			10/13/2009	Room 3010/3012
			13:00 - 14:00
	Managing Your PeopleSoft Enterprise HCM Upgrade	Carolyn Cozart, Oracle; Michael St-Jean, Hewlett-Packard Company	Tuesday	Moscone West L3
S308652			10/13/2009	Room 3002/3004
			14:30 - 15:30
	Maximizing Oracle Real Application Clusters 11g: Sharing the Load with Services	Steve Phillips, HP; Sherri Trojan, HP	Tuesday	Moscone South
S312323			10/13/2009	Room 236
			14:30 - 15:30
	Leveraging Siebel CRM to Thrive in the Professional Services Industry	Marilu Davis, Hewlett-Packard; Marshall Powell, Oracle	Tuesday	Westin Market Street Hotel
S310794			10/13/2009	Metropolitan I **
			16:00 - 17:00
	Jump on the Oracle Service Bus—Destination: A Hosted Procurement Solution	Greg Fookes, HP; Lynne O'Donoghue, University of Canterbury	Tuesday	Marriott Hotel
S310503			10/13/2009	Salon 1
			16:00 - 17:00
	EDS, an HP Company, Case Study: Modernizing Applications for Italy's Ministry of Education	Luc Vogeleer, EDS, an HP company	Tuesday	Moscone West L3
S312601			10/13/2009	Room 3000
			16:00 - 17:00
	Implementing a BI Strategy for Oracle E-Business Suite at Sun Microsystems	Junean Lanigan, Sun Microsystems; Rob Reynolds, Oracle; Tami Rosier, EDS; Kathryn Schugart, Sun Microsystems	Tuesday	Moscone West L3
S308529			10/13/2009	Room 3014
			17:30 - 18:30
	Large-Scale Deployment Case Study of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g on HP Linux	Stayton Chock, Hewlett-Packard; Satish Kantheti, Oracle; Oleksandr Otenko, Oracle Corporation	Tuesday	Hilton Hotel
S310650			10/13/2009	Yosemite A
			17:30 - 18:30
	HP Infrastructure Strategies for Oracle Business Intelligence	Don Lutter, HP	Wednesday	Moscone South
S312326			10/14/2009	Room 200
			10:15 - 11:15
	Oracle Forms 3.0 to Developer 10g: A 17-Year Journey	Ralf Koelling, EDS	Wednesday	Marriott Hotel
S308197			10/14/2009	Salon 2
			10:15 - 11:15
	Oracle Enterprise Manager++: Beyond the Basics—Getting More from Oracle Enterprise Manager	Steve Phillips, HP; Sherri Trojan, EDS	Wednesday	Moscone South
S310715			10/14/2009	Room 305
			17:00 - 18:00
	Succeeding in a Deregulated World: EDS/Oracle Solution for Utility Companies	Murali Palanisamy, EDS; Ranga Subramanian, EDS	Wednesday	Palace Hotel
S309731			10/14/2009	Presidio
			17:00 - 18:00
	Virtualize Your Enterprise and Cut Costs with Oracle VM and HP StorageWorks	Wiekus Beukes, Oracle; Thomas Burke, HP	Wednesday	Moscone South
S310187			10/14/2009	Room 303
			17:00 - 18:00

6 G SAS and G6 Servers

s_mathur — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:56:00 GMT

Check out this video to see how 6 Gb/s SAS storage products can optimize the performance of your ProLiant G6 server.

Solid State Drives Go Universal

s_mathur — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 02:53:00 GMT

By J. Daley.

HP has been shipping SSDs in Mid-Range (EVA) and High End (XP) Storage solutions for a while, offering extremely high performance in Tiered Storage applications. Certain HP notebooks and blades also support solid state in limited configurations.

Today HP announced availability of an SSD in our Universal Drive tray; the entire ProLiant G6 family is now capable of extreme performance configurations. Mix and match drives to meet your performance, capacity, power, and cost needs.

Available in 60Gb and 120Gb capacities, HP 3Gb SATA Solid State Drives include a "hot plug" interface, which improves server uptime, serviceability and scalability by allowing easy addition or removal of the drives. Put this where you would put any other HP Universal Drive.

These drives offer reduced power consumption and deliver higher levels of performance enabling customers to meet escalating storage requirements while controlling energy costs. These solutions deliver more than 60 times the random read performance and 15 times the random write performance compared to traditional 15k SAS hard drives.

Check out the new drives at www.hp.com/go/solidstate or read the solid state datasheet to learn more: http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/getdocument.aspx?docname=/4AA2-6615ENW.pdf.

Solid State Drives and DL380 G6 Rev Up SQL Server

s_mathur — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 02:39:00 GMT

By S.R., HP Industry Standard Servers.

The HP ProLiant DL380 G6 achieved the #1 TPC-H 100GB price/performance spot for servers running Microsoft SQL Server. This benchmark is the industry's first ever TPC-H publication using Solid State Drives, demonstrating HP's commitment to high performance technology.

Read the details of the benchmark at: http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/benchmarks/index.html

And check out the new drives at: www.hp.com/go/solidstate

9.9.99 to 9.9.09: the meaning of 9s

Kristie Popp — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:04:00 GMT

In 10 years the definition of "mission critical" has evolved and along with it the demand for continuous uptime has increased. What does "mission critical" mean these days? For me, I expect to be able to do what ever I want - banking, shopping, taking a red-eye, or writing my blog posts at what ever time I feel tickled to do so. Nothing critical about these things, but it's expected. Mission critical capabilities are even more important. In these past 10 years, the expectations have soared, putting more pressure on businesses to deliver services around-the-clock, without interruption. Predictable availability of services is a significant differentiator for businesses today. Lorraine Bartlett, VP of Marketing and Strategy for HP's Business Critical Systems pulls together her thoughts and is looking for yours at her blog on this topic here. Check it out & add your thoughts.