Posted by Crystal Nichols on Fri, Sep 03, 2010 @ 07:22
Growing hardware and software needs can eat away at a data center’s resources very quickly. When a business grows or changes, it can be difficult at best to stay in lock step with those changing business needs. Simple tasks such as change management or provisioning start taking up a larger share of your IT resources. And, while you can add staff to address these needs, you’re creating some longer-term problems by doing so.
For that reason, data center automation makes more sense today than ever, and HP offers a number of data center automation solutions that can help to contain costs, increase the efficiency of your staff and minimize the risk of errors in repetitive manual tasks.
HP BSA – Business Services Automation – can improve your data center in a number of ways. To start with, repetitive tasks like patching, provisioning and configuration management are handled automatically. This allows your IT staff to focus their time and energies into projects and into finding new ways to help the business maintain its competitive edge. Whether it’s checking the size of file systems or simply verifying licenses, HP BSA can take the burden of mundane manual tasks from your staff.
On top of efficiency, data center automation solutions from HP can help significantly with compliance. Without automation, a company might have to bring in temporary IT staffing to check configurations and patch levels in order to prepare for an audit. Using HP BSA, that same company can establish its consistent standards and apply them throughout the enterprise in a rapid and easy fashion.
Data center automation can help in a number of other ways, too. By implementing HP BSA technologies, you can experience fewer service disruptions as well as less unplanned downtime. Your change management process becomes both more accurate and faster. You improve the overall efficiency of the data center by automating routine tasks. You also gain a greater degree of visibility, as well as control, in regard to your IT resources.
HP’s BSA software is sophisticated and agile. The full suite of data center automation solutions from HP includes:
• HP Server Automation Software
• HP Storage Essentials Software
• HP Network Automation Software
• HP Client Automation Software
• HP Operations Orchestration Software
• HP BSA Essentials Community and Subscription Service
As you can see, HP’s data center automation solutions are robust, and can provide your organization with a number of benefits.
Talk to Unitiv today about these solutions.
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Mon, Jul 26, 2010 @ 08:56
As any data center manager or CIO can tell you, data center power costs have become a huge concern. Being able to measure the efficiency of power usage at the data center and being able to make improvements can reduce energy costs and also create an environment in which data center equipment operates at a higher level of efficiency. The good news for data center managements is that there’s a new way to measure power on the way.
A number of organizations, spearheaded by The Green Grid, has created a method for data centers to be able to measure the efficiency of their power expenditures. The standard, known as Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), is designed to help bring some consistency to the way that data centers measure power usage, and to make it so that different data centers can compare their numbers.
The standard creates the PUE measurement by comparing the actual energy used by a data center to the amount of energy that actually makes it to the IT equipment. This demonstrates how much power is consumed by ancillary systems, such as cooling systems.
There’s been talk of using PUE in the data center for some time, but up until now there hasn’t been a way to compare it in a standard way. This method for calculating PUE was developed by The Green Grid along with the U.S. Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star Program, the Uptime Institute, the U.S. Building Council and more.
For now, the group has only released recommendations for dedicated data centers. The plan is to provide another set of recommendations for use in data centers that are not part of a dedicated facility, but rather are one part of a mixed-use facility.
This new standard will help to create a common understanding in the industry that should foster dialogue and will, in the long run, create more efficient data centers. It utilizes four different ways of tracking PUE so as to include as many types of data centers as possible. The lowest level of measurement uses the utility meter to take snapshots over 12 12 months, while the most accurate type of PUE measurement will measure at the point where devices connect to the electrical distribution system.
Green Networking in the Data Center
Download this white paper from HP for more information about:
- The challenge of a complex data center
- Green data center best practices
- Power and cooling utilization
- Building efficient infrastructures
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Tue, Jul 20, 2010 @ 06:42
It’s easy to get stuck in an infinite retention trap. Absent a unified storage management and retention policy and strategy, you wind up erring on the side of caution and saving everything forever.
This is, of course, the retention policy that takes the least amount of effort, at least in terms of design. It’s also the least efficient. When you keep all of your information forever, you’re going to have higher costs in the end. You need to maintain every application tied to all of your retained information, and eventually you’re going to find your data center bursting at the seams.
The folks at HP are familiar with the infinite retention trap. Accordingly, they offer a handful of ideas about how to get started in creating an information retirement policy:
1. Know what your data needs are. You need to analyze how much data you have today, as well as how fast your data needs are growing. At some point down the road, you’re going to hit your limit. That limit might be one of physical space in the data center. It might be a limitation in manpower to manage your burgeoning infrastructure. In most cases, that limit is going to be budgetary.
2. Know what kind of information you have. Not all information is created equal. You need to bring in experts from your various business units to categorize every piece of data. You need to classify data as business records or non-records, and then proceed to create a specific policy of retention and retirement for each category.
3. Identify your regulator obligations. Once you have your categories of information, you need to start thinking about how regulatory requirements affect each of those categories. Regulations will vary greatly depending on your industry, as well as the type of data you’re talking about and how you use that data.
4. Choose your vendor carefully. You need to choose the right solution for your needs. You want a solution that can implement your retirement and retention policies through the entire life of the record. You need a solution that will support multiple types of data, including email and business applications. Whenever possible, your solution should include an open data format so you can access your data through a variety of means. Finally, you need to choose a vendor that’s going to be around through the life of your data, so they need to be one that’s stable and that isn’t going to shut down any time soon.
There are many vendors that can help you implement these kindsof storage retention policies, and HP is at the top of the list when it comes to providing robust solutions in an affordable way.
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Tue, Jun 29, 2010 @ 10:22
While there are naysayers who think that the NAS market is on the decline, there are others that forecast continued and expansive growth in the NAS market. One company suggest that the enterprise NAS market will hit 62,000 petabytes some time in 2012.
What does that mean for your enterprise? Well, for one, it means that the big NAS vendors, from EMC to HP to IBM to Dell, will all be competing for your business, alongside the traditional NAS market leaders. It also means an opportunity to take advantage of innovations in the area of file virtualization systems, and with cloud storage solutions that meet the NAS needs of your enterprise in unconventional ways.
It also means that you need to get your Enterprise NAS priorities in order. You need to recognize the problem areas in your NAS implementations. The biggest problem for the vast majority of enterprises is the rapid growth of your installed storage systems base.
You need to be able to make your NAS systems as efficient as possible in many areas, from power to cooling to footprint. How do you do that? While every enterprise has its own unique situation, there are some general guiding principles you can follow to address this enterprise NAS priority:
• Maximize your storage resource management tools. Use those tools to measure your NAS capacity and efficiency. Even starting with something basic like the File Server Resource Manager built in to Windows Server 2008 is a start. Most enterprises should consider implementing a more robust storage resource management tool, however. IBM, HP and all of the major vendors offer these kinds of tools, and there’s bound to be one that will work well in your environment.
• Focus on optimization. There are a number of optimization tools out there, as well. Specifically, you want to use storage optimization tools that will not only give you data on your environment, but be able to use deduplication and comrpession technologies, as well.
• Increase virtualization. Virtualization of your enterprise storage environment lets you use intellegent tiering of your storage, moving your less-used data to lower-cost storage systems accordingly.
• Move valuable data with infrequent access to the cloud. There are a number of solutions that allwo you to move applications to the cloud, including your storage management, optimzation and virtualization tools.
Implementing these kinds of changes will help you meet the rapidly-changing needs of your organization while making sure that your NAS solutions don’t overcrowd the resources of your data center.
Interested in learning more about how lower operational costs through process automation? Click here to download the whitepaper.
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Thu, Jun 03, 2010 @ 07:31
While Oracle and Sun continue to try to blur the lines between their solutions and wedge businesses into relying on Sun hardware for Oracle support, many businesses recognize that there are other valid and, in some cases, superior, options. One of the alternatives is HP Storage Solutions for Oracle. HP offers industry-leading performance combined with robust management tools to give you the fast and easy access to your business data that your organization needs.
HP offers a number of solutions for Oracle, and gives you full control over all of your server, network and storage resources. You can use HP OpenView storage software to make your infrastructure management less complex, to increase productivity, and to reduce the cost of storage maintenance.
Here are some of the solutions HP offers Oracle users:
• Business continuity. One of the biggest concerns for any organization is downtime and the loss of data. Even more so than just a few years ago, loss of data and downtime will negatively impact your bottom line. You can use HP StorageWorks in your Oracle environment to provide both continuity and availability. These solutions are available across the board, from small businesses that use DAS to large enterprises with multiple sites and ridiculous amounts of data.
• Business intelligence. HP provides a number of pre-integrated solutions that utilize their industry partners to give you the kind of insight and decision-making resources that you need to make your business as smart as it can be.
• Compliance solutions. No matter what kind of business you have, there are going to be varying requirements for your keeping of electronic records. HP solutions help you to mitigate your risk by designing an infrastructure that supports your compliance requirements.
• Storage consolidation. With consolidation solutions, you can add significant value to your business. You can use HP storage solutions with oracle to both simplify and standardize your storage infrastructure in a way that provides you with maximum flexibility and efficiency.
• Storage resource management. The IT storage environment is unpredictable on a good day. Accordingly, you are constantly looking for better ways to manage that storage. Whether you’re talking about securing your storage, keeping tabs on the quality of service for your storage, or keeping on top of change management, HP storage solutions for oracle help you get the control you need in order to make your organization’s information available to who needs it when they need it.
There are a number of business benefits to using HP Storage Solutions for Oracle. You will have greater agility in responding to changing business conditions. You’ll have increased value out of the IT function, while mitigating risk. You can manage your IT server and storage management in a unified environment. You’re also relying on industry-leading and cutting-edge technologies.
For more information, go to www.hp.com/storage/oracle.
HP StorageWorks Solutions for Oracle Technologies. Click here to download the brochure.
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Wed, Dec 23, 2009 @ 08:00
The marketplace for Enterprise Storage Management (ESM) is changing rapidly. Storage utilization is growing in many enterprises by as much as 60 percent to 100 percent each year. Experts suggest that the ESM market will continue to grow by at least 10 percent a year for the foreseeable future. For your business to keep up with these trends, you need to not only know what’s going on but also know what types of solutions will best fit your business’s needs.
It’s important, first of all, to recognize that ESM encompasses more than just technology. Your people and the processes your company uses are also an integral part of ESM. Implementing a new technology is futile if it doesn’t fit your company’s culture, the way it does things, and even its business purposes.
ESM and Business Continuity
Some of the most pressing issues in ESM right now are the twin imperatives of disaster recovery and business continuity. As data need grow in volume, the ability of backup systems to keep pace without demanding network or SAN resources is no easy task.
Still, an effective ESM solution has to take disaster recovery and business continuity into account. As many as 90 percent of companies that experience a significant data loss due to a disaster will go out of business within five years. Just under half of businesses never open their doors again after a disaster. Effective ESM can greatly improve the odds of your company to survive these kinds of trials.
ESM and Heterogeneous Environments
Another significant problem for ESM right now is heterogeneity. Today’s enterprise is typically no longer a one-vendor shop. Enterprise IT personnel recognize that you need best-in-class solutions for many business functions, and that a single-vendor solution is almost never the most efficient way to go.
This is, of course, a challenge in many IT areas, not just ESM. Heterogeneity affects performance management and data sharing as much as it does ESM. However, an effective ESM solution is one that’s able to serve multiple environments and still keep utilization and management from becoming a logistical nightmare.
ESM and Legacy Data
A third issue facing ESM today is the issue of legacy systems. When you transition a business function from one environment to another, you will ideally pull archived data along with the transition. In cases where this isn’t possible, you not only need to maintain the legacy system, you need to provide an effective storage solution for that data.
A workable ESM solution takes into account legacy data. If the ESM can’t offer legacy data to both old and new systems, it still needs to be able to preserve the data for whatever archival purposes are required by business process or by industry regulations.
The Right ESM Solution for You
When you’re choosing an ESM, you need to focus on several factors. All of these issues should be addressed in the process of evaluating solutions:
• Necessary data performance throughput,
• Availability of business-critical data and applications,
• Scalability,
• Backup and Recovery,
• And, of course, your budget.
Download the HP Storage Essentials Data Sheet.
Find out how to optimize your business intelligence outcomes with an easy-to-use
interface that provides powerful query, analysis, and custom reporting
of heterogenous storage and infrastructure assets.
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Wed, Nov 04, 2009 @ 06:00
HP Insight is one of the most useful and versatile server management tools on the market today. HP Insight gives you control of your entire server environment, including HP-UX, Linux, OpenVMS, NonStop and Windows systems. Even if you’re not running HP servers, this software can perform many server management tasks right from its single management console.
In addition, if you have HP server hardware in your enterprise, HP Insight provides hardware-level management. HP insight covers a number of different HP systems. In the server realm, it will manage ProLiant, Integrity and HP 9000 servers. It will handle HP BladeSystems. In the storage array category, HP Insight can handle Storage Works MSA, EVA and XP arrays.
Here are some of the things HP insight can provide you, all from a single console:
• Automatic discovery and identification. The autodiscovery feature even includes filter so that you can prevent HP Insight from locating unwanted types of devices.
• Automatic event handling. This feature lets you configure specific policies that will execute scripts in response to an event. It can notify relevant users and forward those events through pager, email or even SMS.
• Quick and easy installation. HP insight’s installation Wizard gives you easy-to-follow instructions for getting Insight set up. It also helps you to configure the settings for HP Insight on the CMS (Central Management Server).
• Fault management. HP Insight gives you a proactive notification of failure alerts, whether they’ve already failed or whether failure is impending.
• Security. This application uses the security of your Operating Systems to create both SSL and SSH encrypted communications, so you can be sure your remote management is kept safe and secure. In addition, you can delegate management responsibilities using a role-based security system, allowing you to give particular job functions on particular devices to particular users.
• Management of multiple systems. You can use HP Insight from your CMS to perform a specific task across multiple servers. This frees up your time, saving you from the tedious process of performing the task on each individual server.
• Snapshots. You can use HP Insight to take snapshots of as many as four different configurations, whether on different servers or the same server, and compare them to one another.
• Version control. Insight will get the most recent updates for your Integrity and your Proliant Windows or Linux servers. This includes everything from BIOS to drivers to agent updates. You can then release those updates across a group of servers all at once.
• Interfaces. You can use either the GUI or the CLI interface at your console in order to manage HP Insight.
• WBEM indications. You can subscribe (or unsubscribe, for that matter) to Web-Based Enterprise Management indications for SMI-S, Linux and HP-UX as well.
HP Insight is perhaps the most versatile and useful single-console server management solution you can choose, especially if you rely on HP servers for any or all of your server infrastructure.
Click here to receive a white paper on HP Insight Orchestration software.
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Mon, Oct 26, 2009 @ 08:56
If you rely on HP BladeSystem servers in your enterprise, you need to consider HP Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager. HP Virtual connect helps to increase the productivity of your entire organization, respond in a quicker fashion to changes in workload or infrastructure and even whittle away at your operating costs. Whether you use Virtual Connect across a LAN or a SAN, the centralized connectivity and workload mobility that come as a result are valuable assets.
HP Virtual Connect is an architect
ure that you’ll find in each BladeSystem c-Class enclosure. The Enterprise Manager component gives you a single, central console from which you can do a number of tasks. You can administer LAN or SAN addresses, do group-based configuration management and more. You can initiate deployments, movements or even failover of server-to-network connections. Virtual Connect is scalable in that you can do these things for 200 Virtual Connect domains. That’s 800 BladeSystem enclosures or more than 12,000 blade servers.
This makes your infrastructure change-ready. Virtual Connect means that you can add, recover, replace or remove servers across your datacenter environment in just minutes without affecting the availability of your network. Virtual connect is idea for a datacenter that has multiple BladeSystem enclosures.
HP Virtual connect also helps your infrastructure in a number of other ways. It helps to provide increased consistency. It helps to centralize and to simplify both connectivity and workload management. It reduces the amount of time you need to invest in deploying and maintaining your server infrastructure, and it reduces the risks involved in deployment, too. HP Virtual Connect lets you respond in a much quicker way to the changing demands of your business.
The HP Virtual Connect software also works to provide you with the kind of dynamic infrastructure your business needs. You can rapidly repurpose servers using HP Virtual Connect. You can also migrate servers from a test to a production environment with a few simple and quick clicks.
All of this means that your management processes are simplified. Because a single console can be used to manage so vast a server farm, you save time and optimize the use if IT personnel. You’ll be able to increase productivity of your IT resources, as well. HP Virtual Connect will even increase your server-to-administrator ratio.
Reduced operating costs are another benefit to HP Virtual connect. You can deploy configurations to groups of servers across Virtual Connect domains. This, in turn, reduces the time costs involved in deployment, maintenance and recovery.
Finally, HP Virtual Connect lets you respond quickly to changing needs. In just a few minutes, you can make server infrastructure changes. You can assign failover server connection profiles between your servers and between BladeSystem enclosures.
In the end, HP Virtual Connect is a must-have for any company with an HP Server infrastructure. Its scalability, versatility and raw power put control – real control – of your servers in the hands of your administrators, and will reduce the overall TCO of your server infrastructure.
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Fri, Oct 16, 2009 @ 11:12
HP Storage Essentials is the ultimate storage and resource management (SRM) software package available, especially if you rely on HP storage products in your company. It is versatile, scalable and will benefit your company in a number of ways. It is an integral part of any storage management infrastructure plan, and can greatly improve the efficiency of your storage solutions while contributing to a lower Total Cost of Ownership.
How exactly does HP Storage Essentials fit into your storage management infrastructure? Take a look for yourself. Here are some of the basic features and benefits of HP Storage Essentials:
Integration
HP Storage Essentials integrates several of your IT management tasks. Storage Essentials touches several areas, from things like provisioning and reporting to operations and charge back. This tool handles your storage management needs, from end to end.
Automatic Discovery
This software gives you access to your entire data network automatically. HP Storage Essentials can create a visual map of your entire storage network, including DAS, SAN and NAS. This map includes not only the objects in the network, but the paths and zones between applications as well as LUN information.
Easy Configuration and Customization
Storage Essentials uses tools like its SRM Host Cluster Builder Wizard to map your unique HA configurations. In addition, it seamlessly integrates all of this data into the overall big picture map, putting everything you need right at your fingertips in just a matter of minutes.
Increased Availability
Applications like Oracle, MS SQL, Sybase and even Microsoft Exchange require a high degree of availability in the enterprise. HP Storage Essentials gives that to you by monitoring and reporting on performance. Everything from applications to disk subsystems to HBA is examined, and bottlenecks can be quickly detected.
Standards-Based Architecture
HP Storage Essentials relies on SMI-S, the industry standard in storage network management. It utilizes CIM and WBEM, and also supports a multi-vendor storage infrastructure.
Customizability
You can create your own set of reports from the standard templates. You can customize the reports to measure performance management, capacity management, asset management, and a host of other items. Best of all, you can access these reports in a number of ways, including Adobe PDF, Microsoft Excel, HTML or XML.
Unified Tools
Your IT staff can use HP Storage essentials to manage many different areas, such as XP arrays, infrastructure and servers, all from a single user interface. In addition, HP Storage Essentials provides you with the ability to integrate your NAS backup with your infrastructure backup. It will analyze how configuration changes or file sharing activities will affect all of these areas, as well.
If you’re running HP storage devices as part of your storage solution, you can’t do without HP Storage Essentials. When you combine the power of HP Storage essentials with other tools offered by HP, such as HP Insight, you have everything you need to fully manage your storage infrastructure and maintain the kind of service levels that your business needs to have to keep functioning.
__________________________________
Optimize your business intelligence outcomes with an easy-to-use
interface that provides powerful query, analysis, and custom reporting
of heterogenous storage and infrastructure assets.
Click here to download the data sheet
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Mon, Oct 05, 2009 @ 06:00
One of the biggest concerns of CIOs, IT managers, SAN administrators and even network engineers is the issue of storage provisioning. Storage provisioning, in a nutshell, is the process of assigning storage in order to optimize the performance of your Storage Area Network (SAN). Provisioning can be a tremendously tedious process, as any SAN administrator can tell you.
Why is storage provisioning so taxing? Well, for one, storage provisioning requires you to go through several steps, all of which must occur in a specific order. You have to assign LUNs (Logical Unit Numbers), verify that data storage and data recovery routes are available to users when they need them, create alternate routes in case of a partial failure, and make sure that the SAN can accommodate expansion. Once everything has been engineered and set up, you have to thoroughly test the SAN before you can commit your valuable data to it.
The good news is that a process known as automated storage provisioning has risen in popularity. There are a number of programs that perform automated storage provisioning. These programs are designed to lessen the workload of the SAN administrator, and to free her up for other less-tedious tasks.
There are different types of automated storage provisioning you should be familiar with. Each type represents an increasingly complex level of automated storage provisioning, and what sort your business uses depends on how intense and complex your needs are.
Application-Aware Provisioning
This sort of provisioning provides solutions for business services by adapting your storage situation to the needs of the application. For example, a given application in your organization might have threshold requirements for applications or application data. When the data or the application service level hits the threshold requirement, this type of automated storage provisioning software kicks in and alerts the SAN administrator. This kind of solution runs across virtualized volumes, providing a great deal of flexibility as well as tools that will simplify and automate the provisioning efforts.
Policy-Driven Provisioning
Another sort of automated storage provisioning is policy-driven provisioning. This type of software lets you set business-specific policies. These policies kick in to assign and to configure your storage space and paths so that the application can run properly. This kind of automated storage provisioning will help you maintain your service level objectives, also through the use of thresholds. Here again, this type fo solution will automated many of the tasks involved in expanding your SAN.
You have many choices when it comes to choosing an automated storage provisioning solution. HP is one of the most widely-praised vendors, but there are others, too.
If you want to greatly increase the reliability and service level of your Storage Area Network and free up your valuable IT resources to address other tasks, you should consider an automated storage provisioning solution.