I was recently at the HP Campus in Houston, Texas, for the 2010 HP Infrastructure Tech Day for Blade Servers.

In the market for servers of any kind, HP is a leader, and when this opportunity to reprise my 2009 visit to the (HP) Blades Team presented itself, I just had to take it.

Fact: HP manufactures a server every 12 seconds.

A pedigree like that is not easy to live up to, and surpass, especially in the challenging economic environment we have had recently around the globe. However, I am a believer in innovation, an HP has shown itself to be innovative.

Alyson Griffin welcomed us to the event, and Gary Thome, VP for Blades then took over.

Data Center Trends
Datacenters around the world have found out some looming and costly side effects of datacenter sprawl: power and cooling concerns.

I should know. For we have the same issues at our datacenter, which, unfortunately, is located in California. (Not unfortunate that it is in lovely California; unfortunate that it is located in California where power is muy expensive.)

At the ProLiant G6 launch last year, I had the opportunity to be briefed on the new servers, and be introduced to blade computing. Gary Thome introduced us to blades, Brad May and his Blade Server SWAT Team were educated us on the benefits of blades, and Dan Bowers broke down several of the new blades. It was at this time that I had an epiphany: for Logikworx and our clients going forward, we were no longer going to consider rackmounts as the next step in the evolution of our datacenter, it would be blades, and blades only. Unless, of course, something better showed up.

Fact: HP is the world leader in Industry-Standard servers

Since that launch, HP hasn’t been sitting still. It has released the SL-series of blades and also storage blades.

Power Capping* and Thermal Logic functionalities are built into HP blade servers. These technologies allow data center admins to granularly control the power and thermal footprints of servers deployed in datacenters. Power capping can also be selective.

If you include the ‘sea of sensors’ and the multiple options available for the servers, including the usage of Intel Xeon ‘Nehalem’ CPUs, 1333 MHz RAM, and Virtual Connect, you have a world-class series of server blades. Don’t forget HP Insight Suite.

* Power capping functionality is hardware-based.

Virtual Connect
One of the innovations in HP blades is Virtual Connect.

Just what, you might ask, is Virtual Connect?

Virtual Connect is a technology devised by HP that allows network administrators to add, replace, recover, and manage server blades on an ad hoc basis. The most visible part of Virtual Connect is Flex-10.

From HP:

Virtual Connect Flex-10 technology is a hardware based solution that enables server administrators to partition each 10 gigabit Ethernet port into 4 and regulate the data speed of each partition. HP Flex-10 technology is available only with Virtual Connect (VC).

The Virtual Connect Flex-10 feature set enables VC to configure a single 10Gb network port of BladeSystem servers to represent four physical NIC devices, also called FlexNICs, with a total bandwidth of 10Gbps. These four FlexNICs appear to the operating system (OS) as discrete network interface controllers (NIC), each with its own driver. While the FlexNICs share the same physical port, traffic flow for each one is isolated with its own MAC address and virtual local area network (VLAN) tags between the FlexNIC and VC Flex-10 interconnect module. The bandwidth available to each FlexNIC is controlled by the server administrator through the Virtual Connect Manager interface.

Suffice it to say, when you have technology like this at your disposal, those <censored> dreams of on-the-fly configuration of network resources become a pleasant reality.

Fact: HP Blade Servers were used in the production of Avatar, the best-selling movie of all time.

Furthermore, we were told, the amount of headroom built into Virtual Connect Flex-10 future-proofs your investment in the product.

That added benefit alone makes it a good buy.

Insight Software
HP Insight is a suite of software management products from HP that provide hooks into the hardware.

Insight Software consists of two suites: Insight Control for essential management, and Insight Dynamics for advanced management. A third layer is the Insight Manager.

Some of the functionality in Insight Control is direct ProLiant management for deployment, system health, power management, and remote access.

As usual, Insight integrates with HP OpenView, as well as Microsoft SCCM (Systems Center Configuration Manager) and VMWare.

StorageWorks CTO Perez
Calvin Zito, @HPStorageGuy, was able to persuade Paul Perez, HP StorageWorks VP and Chief technologist, to come over and talk to us about HP StorageWorks, and how the products relate to innovations in storage.

One thing I like in a product manager/owner is confidence in their products, and their choices. Paul was able to exude that confidence about HP’s storage, a condition that permeated the room.

He led us through the fruits of the IBRIX acquisition.

Then he laid a good one: he thinks memristors will be at the vanguard of evolutionary advances in storage over the next few years. Furthermore, he added, he considers spindles to passé, declaring the era of spindles for IOPs to be over!

Asked about SSDs, he informs us that they are viewed within his OU as an extension of RAM (main computer memory).

HP ProLiant Blades Labs
My second visit in as many years to the HP Blades Lab was just as informative as the first.

This time though, the focus was on the HP BladeSystem c7000 enclosures.

We were walked through several configs, and a few facts were also revealed:

BladeSystems have four fan zones with variably spinning fans and 23-stage fans.

Unquestioned efficiency

Client Virtualization
One of the technologies I am enamored with is client virtualization, and the promise it holds for compat mediation.

Joseph George walked us through HP’s strategy in this space.

HP is committed to bringing its products and technologies to market here. HP has been in client virtualization for several years, and has been making company and technology buys to round out their offerings, despite the fact that most of the technology is home grown.

HP’s offerings are designed to work with client virtualization products from most of the major client virtualization vendors, especially Microsoft Med-V, formerly SoftGrid.