COMPOSABLE INFRASTRUCTURE: MOMENTUM AND BENEFITS ACROSS MULTIPLE INDUSTRIES - PeerPaper Report - HPE
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PeerPaper Report COMPOSABLE INFRASTRUCTURE: MOMENTUM AND BENEFITS ACROSS MULTIPLE INDUSTRIES IT Central Station users describe the impact of HPE Synergy in finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and technology services 2020 Synergy powered by Intel
ABSTRACT Composable Infrastructure, as exemplified by HPE Synergy, has experienced broad uptake across industries spanning financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and technology services. System owners are putting the solution to use in a variety of workloads such as VDI, analytics, and hybrid cloud. As HPE Synergy users on IT Central Station describe, benefits include faster time to deploy, more efficient infrastructure, and more productive uses of time for infrastructure managers. ©2020, IT Central Station Composable Infrastructure: Momentum and Benefits Across Multiple Industries
CONTENTS
Page 1. Introduction
Page 2. HPE Synergy Overview
Page 3. Financial Services
Page 4. Healthcare
Page 6. Manufacturing
Page 8. Tech Service Providers
Page 10. Conclusion
©2020, IT Central Station Composable Infrastructure: Momentum and Benefits Across Multiple IndustriesINTRODUCTION Companies in the financial services, that it enables faster deployment times healthcare, manufacturing, and tech and more efficient infrastructure. As services sectors have embraced HPE described in user reviews on IT Central Synergy, a composable infrastructure. Station, infrastructure managers and These enterprises have found a variety their teams are also discovering they of workloads they can run on this single can focus more on new revenue infrastructure, including virtual desktops generating projects for the company (VDI), virtualization, data management, once they have adopted HPE Synergy, analytics, hybrid cloud, containers, versus just focusing on how to “keep and other workloads. The solution is the lights on.” Except where noted, gaining momentum in these industries reviewers work at companies with and others because users are finding 1,000+ employees. ©2020, IT Central Station Composable Infrastructure: Momentum and Benefits Across Multiple Industries 1
HPE Synergy Overview
HPE Synergy, which runs Intel Xeon
processors, offers infrastructure
managers a compact, self-contained
solution designed for composability.
A physical “frame” provides an
underlying network fabric and slots
for specially designed compute
and storage modules. It embeds
management software, HPE OneView,
that provides admins a unified view of
all infrastructure elements. Through
a single interface, HPE Synergy
composes compute, storage, and
fabric pools into any configuration for
any application. It combines software-
Network Switch
defined intelligence with a unified API
that incorporates powerful tools from Storage
Compute
Compute
Compute
the extensive HPE partner ecosystem. Platform
Controller
Figure 1 shows a simplified reference
architecture for the solution. (For more
Storage
Storage
Storage
Storage
Storage
Storage
information, see the IT Central Station
Peer Paper “Best Practice for Choosing HPE Synergy Frame
a Composable, Software-Defined
Figure 1 - The HPE Synergy frame and its contents:
Infrastructure Solution”.) compute, storage, network switch, and platform controller.
©2020, IT Central Station Composable Infrastructure: Momentum and Benefits Across Multiple Industries 2Financial Services
IT Central Station members in the financial services industry are deploying HPE
Synergy across multiple use cases. For example, an Advisor System Administrator at
a financial services firm with over 200 employees explained how he is using VMware
ESX across all of his HPE Synergy nodes. He said, “We have a mixture of workloads
from web servers, application servers, and Microsoft SQL databases.”
Financial services users are realizing a range provisioning, he was able to speed up time to
of benefits from HPE Synergy. An IT Director market using the solution’s server templates
at a small financial services firm, for instance, and profiles. He said, “That’s something that
remarked, “It has made our IT infrastructure otherwise would probably take a couple of days
teams more efficient. Previously, we had a to get done. Now it’s just a push of a button.
standard infrastructure, which was compute, We’re talking about it taking seconds to a minute.
power, and storage. They had to run from one In addition, I would say Synergy has decreased
‘‘
place to another to create a virtual machine. Now our deployment time by about 80 percent and it
they can do everything in one shot.” has reduced our cost of operations.”
A Manager at a financial services firm also
praised HPE Synergy because, as he said, “The
Synergy has decreased our deploy-
Synergy environment provides us with one view.
We’re able to manage the entire stack, top to ment time by about 80 percent and it
bottom, from that single view. The solution helps has reduced our cost of operations.
to manage our IT landscape, especially in setting
up servers quickly, and making sure that the “Using this solution has allowed me to devote
server types are distributed in our various dealer more time to other tasks since the administration
centers.” This mattered to him because, as he is so easy,” said the Advisor System Administrator.
put it, “It’s not reinventing the wheel all the time. He added, “When we have had to spin things
It also helps us reconfigure servers for specific up quickly, we were able to do that in this
tasks and allocate more servers during busy environment. This solution has greatly increased
times. We are able to implement new business the efficiency of our IT infrastructure teams.”
requirements quickly.” He cited Disaster Recovery The financial services Server Architect shared,
(DR) as an example. “The solution has reduced our infrastructure
costs compared to the c7000 platform. The most
This user also experienced an infrastructure valuable feature of this solution is composability.
efficiency increase of about 60% with HPE HPE OneView is head and shoulders above the
Synergy. Specifically, with regard to server competition in this space.”
©2020, IT Central Station Composable Infrastructure: Momentum and Benefits Across Multiple Industries 3Healthcare
The healthcare sector is also putting
HPE Synergy to work. An Operational
Database Administrator at a healthcare
company is using HPE Synergy to host
the main infrastructure for a big project.
He has multiple frames all managed
by a single HPE OneView interface.
A Senior Systems Engineer at a health-
care company with more than 500
employees uses HPE Synergy for the
compute requirements of composable
infrastructure. He elaborated, saying,
“We are using it for Hyper-V and our SQL
environments right now. We are doing
some DevOps on it, as well.”
“The primary use case is VMware hosts,” said yet where I cannot manage all of the Synergy
a Network Specialist at a healthcare company. enclosures from OneView. We have seen an
“Since most of our environment is virtualized, it improvement in the efficiency of our IT infrastructure.
is our primary compute.” A System Engineer at a It is faster to do firmware upgrades through the
‘‘
healthcare company noted that “VMware is our deployment of new bladed servers.”
primary use case for this solution. We run all of our
production servers and non-production servers.
That’s what our cloud delivers virtual workloads to.”
We have seen an improvement in the
IT Central Station members in healthcare report efficiency of our IT infrastructure.
improvements in IT management, among many
benefits derived from the use of HPE Synergy. The The Senior Systems Engineer remarked that
healthcare Network Specialist, who had previously “spinning up an environment is much quicker,
been running nine HPE BladeSystem c7000 because I don’t have to reconfigure networking and
enclosures, shared, “I have not run into a situation redesign everything from the ground up. I throw a
©2020, IT Central Station Composable Infrastructure: Momentum and Benefits Across Multiple Industries 4new blade into the frame and configure it based off Engineer. “We can guarantee all of our network and
a template. The solution has improved the efficiency our storage, the firmware baselines — everything
of our IT infrastructure teams by taking less time is exactly the same for every system that sits within
to set stuff up, reducing our deployment time. The a cluster. Synergy also helps us implement new
solution has positively affected the productivity of business requirements quickly. We can deploy new
the development team by creating environments ESX servers faster than we could on the previous
‘‘
quickly.” c-series blade systems.”
Ease of management using the OneView
Composer was a benefit of HPE Synergy for the
We can guarantee all of our network and healthcare Operational Database Administrator. He
our storage, the firmware baselines — commented that “the uptime and the performance
meet our expectations, plus the integration with
everything is exactly the same for
3PAR [storage] is very good. HPE OneView,
every system that sits within a cluster. installed on the Composers, has a very friendly
user interface, which helps to manage the compute
“It has improved management of our IT landscape modules in the frame, compared to management
because we spend a lot less time dealing with used in legacy technologies. The online firmware
inconsistencies and things like firmware and update for the virtual connects has minimized our
driver management,” said the healthcare System downtime windows.”
©2020, IT Central Station Composable Infrastructure: Momentum and Benefits Across Multiple Industries 5Manufacturing
Manufacturers have found a variety
of uses for HPE Synergy, including
virtualization, compute, and cloud.
A Technical Consultant at a manufacturing
company cited virtual machines as his
primary use case. He said, “We run
VMware on them and virtual servers, so
applications, web servers, and things
of that nature. The solution enables us
to run VDI, backups, and web platforms
for our organization in a hybrid cloud
environment.” A Cloud Architect at
a manufacturing company uses HPE
‘‘
Synergy for data center and tech
refresh/cloud — “basically a step in our
transformation to be more hybrid,” as he
The solution enables us to run VDI,
put it. A System Engineer at a manufac-
backups, and web platforms for
turing company runs production and non- our organization in a hybrid cloud
production environments on the solution. environment.
©2020, IT Central Station Composable Infrastructure: Momentum and Benefits Across Multiple Industries 6HPE Synergy speaks to manufacturers’ desire for everything all under one umbrella, when we get
efficient management processes. For example, to the point where the majority of our systems
according to Manager Engineering Services at are all on Synergy.” - Technical Consultant at a
a manufacturing company, “We have one place manufacturing company
with OneView. It provides one console with one
place to get to everything. The one interface • “The solution helps us to implement new
makes it easier. We have one guy who does business requirements quickly. As requests
almost everything in it.” In terms of specific come in, we can turn them around within a
benefits, he said, “The solution has decreased matter of a day or two because we already have
the deployment time for a new blade, saving us the building blocks in place. We have been able
‘‘
three hours.” to give the deployment team what they request
more quickly. We are able to quickly deploy
what is being asked of us. If the development
team needs a platform of 20 servers to run a
particular platform, we can give that to them
The solution has decreased the
within a day or two.” - Cloud Architect at a
deployment time for a new blade, manufacturing company
saving us three hours.
• “Where it used to take one week to re-image
or upgrade our hosts, it can now take one
Other notable comments from manufacturing day. The most valuable feature of this solution
users include: is the ease of deploying servers, profiles,
and images. Having that single pane of glass
• “It makes life easier for us when we are is a good feature for the management of
deploying new technology, as we have the our environment.” - System Engineer at a
building blocks already in place. It will put manufacturing company
©2020, IT Central Station Composable Infrastructure: Momentum and Benefits Across Multiple Industries 7Tech Service Providers
Tech service providers have discovered
HPE Synergy’s utility for serving their
clients’ needs. A VP of Technology at
a small tech services company shared,
“We use it for public cloud right now. It
covers a plethora of workloads. We have
everything from the small, mom-and-
pop, five-user accounting shop running
QuickBooks, all the way up to data
analytics running machine-learning on it.”
A Systems Engineer at a tech services VDI Compute Analytics
Rack Rack Rack
company with over 10,000 employees
uses it mostly as a VMware host. “We’re
a highly virtualized environment,” he
explained, “so we run several VMs per
Unified
blade.” A Senior Server Engineer at a tech Infrastructure
Management
services company with more than 5,000
employees shared, “We use it primarily for
hypervisors at the moment. We’re looking Figure 2 - HPE Synergy offers unified management
across multiple workloads and racks.
at expanding into VDI, but it’s primarily for
hypervisors.”
©2020, IT Central Station Composable Infrastructure: Momentum and Benefits Across Multiple Industries 8“The configurability of the cabinet is its most “We do one-touch deployment for our new
valuable feature. Manageability is a lot less of hypervisors. It helps us implement new business
a headache with OneView. The HPE OneView requirements quickly. It has also decreased our
management solution pushing profiles out to deployment time.” An Architect at a small tech
hosts makes infrastructure management pretty services company observed that productivity
easy. It has decreased our deployment time gain due to faster infrastructure deployment
by 50 percent,” said the tech services Systems was an advantage of HPE Synergy. In his view,
Engineer. “As we purchase and install more this benefit “goes back to the automation tie-
Synergy chassis, then we will be able to manage ins and fluidity of the resource. If they can reuse
them all together as one entity, as opposed componentry, knowing they can do that based
to multiple separate cabinets.” This user also on a temporal basis, and they have some type of
expects the solution to positively affect the scheduling facility, then this makes it significantly
productivity of his development team. Figure 2 easier.”
‘‘
illustrates this unified management capability
across multiple racks. The VP of Technology felt “the main improvement
has been around being able to expand the
environment without building out additional
infrastructure. We have the blade chassis set
We do one-touch deployment for our up. We throw an extra blade in there and we’ve
new hypervisors. It helps us implement just expanded our compute and RAM. It’s made
new business requirements quickly. it much easier for us to grow the infrastructure,
once we put the foundation in place. In terms of
Flexibility for spinning up new hypervisors, managing our IT landscape, it helps by reducing
compared to the c7000, was what mattered to complexity. In addition, our IT infrastructure team
the tech services Server Engineer. As he noted, is more efficient.”
©2020, IT Central Station Composable Infrastructure: Momentum and Benefits Across Multiple Industries 9CONCLUSION Regardless of industry, infrastructure managers are putting HPE Synergy to work in VDI, data management, virtualization, private and hybrid cloud, and many other workloads. The solution is gaining momentum in finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and tech services, among others, because the composable nature of the solution makes it faster to deploy and more efficient to manage. With the composable approach, IT managers not only deploy infrastructure faster but also simplify the management of IT assets through a single user interface. Companies are thus leveraging HPE Synergy as the basis for a new generation of agile, software-defined data centers looking to run both traditional and new cloud-native applications on a single platform. ©2020, IT Central Station Composable Infrastructure: Momentum and Benefits Across Multiple Industries 10
ABOUT IT CENTRAL STATION User reviews, candid discussions, and more for enterprise technology professionals. The Internet has completely changed the way we make buying decisions. We now use ratings and review sites to see what other real users think before we buy electronics, book a hotel, visit a doctor or choose a restaurant. However, in the world of enterprise technology, most of the information online and in your inbox comes from vendors when what you really want is objective information from other users. IT Central Station provides technology professionals with a community platform to share information about enterprise solutions. IT Central Station is committed to offering user-contributed information that is valuable, objective and relevant. We validate all reviewers with a triple authentication process, and protect your privacy by providing an environment where you can post anonymously and freely express your views. As a result, the community becomes a valuable resource, ensuring you get access to the right information and connect to the right people, whenever you need it. www.itcentralstation.com IT Central Station does not endorse or recommend any products or services. The views and opinions of reviewers quoted in this document, IT Central Station websites, and IT Central Station materials do not reflect the opinions of IT Central Station. ABOUT HPE Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the global edge-to-cloud Platform-as-a-Service company that helps organizations accelerate outcomes by unlocking value from all of their data, everywhere. We’re built on decades of reimagining the future through innovation. www.hpe.com ©2020, IT Central Station Composable Infrastructure: Momentum and Benefits Across Multiple Industries 11
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