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A BladeSystem is an infrastructure in a box.
With it, you can build vital solutions to support your business that are more affordable, take less time to maintain, use less power and are ready to grow with you.
In an all-in-one design, you have the essentials to build and maintain your infrastructure from start to finish. Inside, you can host a choice from thousands of applications on Windows®, Linux, HP-UX and more. You can support a combination of virtual machines, storage and server blades—ProLiant, Integrity and StorageWorks—plus connect to a variety of the most popular networking brands and standards including Ethernet, Fibre Channel and InfiniBand.
HP blades range from servers and storage devices to workstations and virtual desktops. Many of HP’s most popular products that you may be familiar with are now available in a blade design.
Each blade is inserted into the BladeSystem enclosure which provides redundancy, network connections and a more efficient, shared power and cooling design. To help setup and maintain your blades, a variety of tools are also built-in to help you at every step.
You don’t need to replace what you have in order to add blades to your IT environment. HP BladeSystems fit in the same racks, connect to the most common networks and SANs, and you can use the same HP tools to manage your blades and other HP server and storage gear. Good times to consider blades include:
Out-dated infrastructure: Common pain points leading to a change in your IT equipment include high support cost, unreliability, low performance, complexity, inflexibility, security, running out of room and rising electric bills.
Upgrade: As part of a common three-to-five year technology refresh cycle, could include end of a leasing agreement.
Adding or Connecting to a SAN: Because BladeSystems eliminate many of the components needed to connect to a SAN, blade servers are 50 to 64% less expensive to connect to your SAN.
Virtualization: BladeSystems are a natural choice for virtualization. ProLiant server blades have all the required features for virtual machines and BladeSystems have the option to virtualize your network and external storage as part of one solution. Now, the Insight Control management suite also includes built-in Virtual Machine Manager to simplify the maintenance of a virtual solution.
Expansion: Natural business growth or a merger and acquisition that requires additional computing, network and storage.
Strategic initiative: Can include the addition of new applications or solutions designed to improve existing equipment or to add a new service.
Consolidation: The most common strategic initiative for large companies today and most common project associated with any of the four change events listed above. Usually paired with some form of virtualization and quickly followed with projects to raise utilization and lower operational costs.
To remove barriers to blade adoption, we build blade versions of our traditional product line, test and certify common OS’s and applications and stay compatible with existing industry standards.
Blade everything—Expand the potential and versatility of BladeSystems to support more applications ranging from storage and servers to PCs, workstations and virtual environments.
Virtualize everything—Extend virtualization beyond the server to move seamlessly between physical and virtual environments and to pool and share all resources from compute and storage to power, cooling and networking.
Automate everything—Streamline processes from monitoring and patching to deploying, provisioning and recovery.
Will blades run what I want to run?
Infrastructure is the heart and soul of HP. The BladeSystem unites 60 years of hardware, software and service expertise into one architecture and applies it to your business needs.
HP BladeSystem is ready for the applications you rely on today and for those you may add in the future. BladeSystem supports two lines of HP servers blade: ProLiant and Integrity.
In most cases, any software application that is certified and supported by the operating system will run on HP BladeSystem; however, exceptions can and do exist.
ProLiant server blades support Microsoft® Windows®,
Linux OS, NetWare and Solaris.
Integrity server blades support HP-UX, HP OpenVMS,
Microsoft Windows and Linux OS.
The problems BladeSystems solve
For 40 years, infrastructures have been built the same way—lots of boxes, connected with lots of wires, and maintained by lots of people. Universally, four infrastructure problems emerge:
Cost: High cost to buy, even higher costs to run and maintain.
Time: Low productivity, downtime and slow reaction to new opportunities.
Change: Inflexible and hard-wired with complex processes and too many people needed to grow or adapt.
Energy: Inefficient, power-hungry systems create rising electric bills and stress the power and air conditioning capacity of the site.
In all cases, these problems are a result of how infrastructures are built, the silos they create and the complex processes behind them. In this “racked, stacked and wired” model, the bigger the infrastructure, the bigger the pain.
A BladeSystem tackles these problems by consolidating everything from the start; before the infrastructure grows out of control. It repackages the moving parts for greater convenience and lower costs, plus it adds useful features to save you time, money and power while making change easy.
