HP: Why Converged Infrastructure Is Better

HP last week unveiled a host of new blade servers aimed at the high-end market, as well as innovations in storage and deduplication technology. Together with yesterday’s announcement of a new set of high performance network and security solutions – including a new Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) module – HP is backing converged infrastructure.

However, the advantages of converged infrastructure have been called into question by some industry vendors and analysts. When Cisco Systems launched its Unified Computing System (UCS) data centre platform in 2009, for example, many of the company’s competitors – including HP – warned that it could be harmful for user choice.

“[Cisco’s] architecture does not unify management, but uses proprietary network-based management structure as the point of control. This is not ‘unification,’ this is a change of control,” said Jim Ganthier, HP’s vice president of Infrastructure Software and Blades, at the time.

To Converge or not to converge?

Cisco UCS certainly gave convergence a big vendor’s endorsement, but smaller rivals such as Juniper Networks and Blade Network Technologies still claim that convergence can stunt innovation and reduce openness.

“Juniper’s strategy is to bring innovation to the networking ecosystem, which badly needs it because the ecosystem is not working currently,” said Juniper’s chairman, chief technical officer and founder, Pradeep Sindhu, in an interview with eWEEK Europe earlier this year. “This business model is not going to be solved by consolidation. It’s going to be solved by innovative companies doing things that actually solve the real problems that the industry is facing … and the best way in which we can do that is by staying independent.”

Blade chief executive Vikram Mehta voiced similar opinions in February, stating that customers do not want to get locked into single vendor solutions. “When I hear you have 27 priorities, you’ve actually got no priorities, I would compete any day with someone who has 27 priorities, because I’m only looking at one thing,” he said.

HP, on the other hand, recently consolidated its move to become a provider of converged infrastructure with its acquisition of networking company 3Com. The purchase gave HP and 3Com about 20 percent of the networking market, putting them in a position to challenge Cisco as the world’s largest provider of networking technology.

But is the move to converged infrastructure really a wise move, particularly in light of Mehta’s suggestion that Cisco could actually be losing money over UCS? We tracked down Mark Potter, senior vice president and general manager of HP’s BladeSystems division, to ask him why converged is better.

“The old way of deploying infrastructure in silos needs to change, especially since our customers are spending 70 percent of their revenue on maintenance and operations,” said Potter. “Our answer for this really is converged infrastructure. “Ultimately our customers are wanting to deploy application services – which require servers, networking, storage and those applications to be seamlessly integrated into that architecture. So converged infrastructure pulls all that together into a pool of resources, delivering simplicity, higher levels of integration that no one else in the industry can achieve.

According to Potter, this gives HP’s customers a faster time to market and a lower cost of acquisition, while it enables them to react to change more quickly and extends the lives of their data centres. “They get more out of what they’re spending, and flip that 70 percent on operation and maintenance to more of their money being spent on truly innovating for their business,” he said.