In the latest realignment, HP is consolidating these release sets with its Proliant Support Packs (PSP’s) and the Firmware releases that were previously three separate distributions.  In addition, HP is adopting a date style of numbering, matching the release set scheme, rather than the version numbering previously used with PSP and Firmware releases.  This will allow administrators to quickly recognize how behind a system is from the current release.

Consolidation also allows a single interface, qualification schedule and unified release for customers on all systems.  Although a solid step, the release sets did not completely match the release of Firmware DVD’s from HP and sometimes there were issues with support where case workers asked that you update firmware out of compliance with a release set.  During their first year of existence, release sets came out often and in many ways, shored up stability in our blade environment, but in the past year, they seemed to have lagged behind in releases.

Back when I first covered release sets, I also noted that it the release sets were a very good thing for customers, since the sets gave a supportable configuration and schedule of compliance.  Although I didn’t say it, compliance meant that the customer could finally force the support side of HP to work a case instead of hiding behind the ‘please patch to latest firmware’ excuse.  My hope is that the SPP will do the same in a unified firmware and driver software release.

On many of our critical systems, we have observed an increased interdependency between the firmware versions and the driver versions which need to be loaded together to gain stability.  Consolidating all these separate releases into a single engine and distribution makes logical sense as these dependencies increase.

In an effort to target exactly what customers need, there will be a master distribution of the SPP along with 6 additional subset versions targeted towards specific needs, per the HP website.    These will be smaller, which translates to faster downloads and a more customized installation, including only what is required for these solutions.

HP touts four major areas of improvement by introducing the SPP — it reduces customer qualification cycles, reduces resource usage, maintenance windows and downtime.  Since firmware patching is typically not the most fun part of a system administrators job, reducing the frequency of these upgrades is a welcome change.

HP plans to offer 3 to 5 of these SPP’s per year.  The first version released is version 2011.09.0 and 2012.01.0 is expected soon.

Local bursting is a fairly simple concept.  The CloudSystem a customer is delivered is built larger than the customer needs or pays for, and the additional capacity is available to the customer to consume on a pay-per-use, utility basis.  This is a very similar concept that has existed with HP SuperDome and Integrity lines (along with IBM’s OnDemand strategy) for a long time, but its now being applied to cloud technology.   But this concept allows for a customer to have additional local resources to consume without the need for additional capital expenses.

In addition to local bursting, HP is working to make a network of service providers that are compatible with CloudSystem through its CloudAgile service provider program.  These partners will include lots of different cloud providers and customers are not locked into a specific technology, such a vCloud, to choose from.  Savvis is a current HP CloudAgile partner, but others mentioned include SHI and Verizon (who is a vCloud provider).  HP has reiterated on several occasions that it is seeking to create an open cloud architecture which can interoperate with multiple and varied third party cloud providers.

Since bursting is one of the more promising concepts within the cloud and we took some time last week to talk about some use cases that would benefit from bursting:

• School photographers have a large spike in traffic during ‘yearbook’ season when they handle the majority of their business.
• College registration produces a peak amount of traffic for schools trying to get students into their desired classes for the coming semester.
• Rendering farms for movies would also be a good use case, because the majority of the time, render farms are not processing on a movie – it is only really required during large render sessions.
• Scholastic testing is also another seasons activity when users needs must be met and performance is key, but which outside of the season is not nearly as great of a computing load.
• Black Friday for ANY retail e-commerce vendor.

But there was one concept which also came up in our bursting conversations – and its an interesting one I’d like to reiterate here – and it is the issue of capacity with service providers.  Bursting and service providers are a new frontier for many companies, so knowing who can and cannot handle our capacity and needs is an interesting concept to think about.  I would think most service providers are not going to advertise their exact capacity (or lack of) for competitive reasons.  So, in those cases, how does a customer gauge whether or not a service provider can handle their workload?  Its a good question and I don’t have the answer, but I would love to hear what readers think.  One interesting point, is that because HP’s CloudSystem is multi-vendor public cloud, if one vendor cannot handle your load, customers have choice to move to another provider.   While this exists for VMware vCloud providers, too, HP is working so that customers can choose from non-vCloud providers as well.

CloudStart is a fixed-engagement service from HP’s  to deliver a fully functional cloud and system library to your site.  As a starter kit, it is fully functional and allow you the basic building blocks to begin deploying systems in a fully-automated cloud on your premises.

The CloudStart option comes with the CloudSystem Matrix software package that ships with CloudSystem (covered here, earlier).  One of the major values of HP CloudSystem and CloudStart are the pre-defined workflows to setup and deploy applications on the cloud, something HP called CloudMaps.  HP has spent a considerable amount of time with their software partners developing the CloudMap workflows to deploy their software successfully in a fraction of the time normally required.  As part of the services engagement, HP will also work with you to bring up four fully functional applications on the cloud.

CloudStart and CloudSystem delivers a multi-vendor cloud system natively, with support VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix.  During the HP Discover this year, I was able to talk with one of the CloudSystem architects about the CloudStart option in more detail.  Something I found surprisingly refreshing, is that HP is supporting third party server and storage hardware with CloudSystem, making it truly multi-vendor at all levels, so customers have choice. Although CloudStart is more of a fixed delivery, customers are free to choose your hypervisor, storage, and x86-based servers in the future and avoid vendor lock-in.

CRN reports that the all-inclusive price for a CloudStart system is $450,000.  For an all-inclusive set of servers, storage, networking, it doesn’t sound like a bad price to me.

Some Basics on Virtual Connect

FlexFabric is a particular type of Virtual Connect module and fits into the FlexNetwork portfolio.  Virtual Connect attempts to address many problems, but primarily it is about reducing the amount of physical wiring and switch ports required to cable a blade system, about reducing human-caused errors due to complex cabling, and about adding the ability to pre-wire the entire enclosure for life and pre-allocate all Ethernet and SAN requirements during first install.

The major selling point of Virtual Connect is the ability to virtualize the network MAC addresses and the Fiber Channel worldwide names/ID (WWID).  Virtual Connect allows for server profiles to be built and assigned to blade hardware and then provides the ability to move the profile from physical blade to physical blade without the need to reconfiguration.  The virtualized WWID and MAC addresses are used instead of the physically assigned addresses that are provided from the manufacturer.

When first introduced, Virtual Connect (VC) existed as separate Ethernet and Fiber Channel modules.  Installed in pairs, each VC module is physically “wired” through a mid-plane to specific blade server ports.  Both the Ethernet and Fiber Channel pairs share a 10Gb “cross connect” connection on the backplane which allows each pair of modules to talk between each other and pass traffic to uplinks from each blade port, even if the uplink is on the other module.  The cross connects also allow for rerouting traffic to the other interconnect bay should an upstream network switch lose connection or become isolated.

Incremental Advancements

The first enhancement for Virtual Connect came with the introduction of Flex-10 technology in 2009, which took a 10Gb network interface on the motherboard and split it into 4 FlexNICs which are LAN on Motherboard (LOM) interfaces and allows the ability to set a fixed amount of bandwidth per FlexNIC.  Each interface is presented to the operating system on the blade as a separate NIC.

Covered in the call last week, the newest innovation in Virtual Connect technology is the ability to condense both Fiber Channel and Ethernet all onto a single set of interconnect modules, known as FlexFabric modules.  FlexFabric allow for the FlexNICs to present either 3 NICs and 1 FCoE (Fiber Channel over Ethernet) converged port to a server or 4 NICs (like the previous Flex-10), depending on server need.  The FlexFabric module removes the need for separate Fiber Channel adapters in a mezzanine slot on a blade and instead uses a Fiber Channel over Ethernet converged LOM.  From the FlexFabric Interconnect module, Fiber Channel uplinks are sent to the Fiber Channel switches and the traditional Ethernet uplinks are sent to network switches.  As the name implies, the ports are flexible and each of the SPF ports is capable of running Ethernet or Fiber Channel uplinks.

With any new technology, practices for security and monitoring must change and adapt to the innovation.  In general, security integration appears to be an afterthought in many cutting edge enhancements, taking VMware for example.  VMware is the most common example when we think of virtualization technology, but when virtual switching was first implemented, there was no way to view inter-VM traffic that never left the host.   In many cases, administrators were faced with a black box making it impossible to monitor, inspect or halt malicious traffic.

With Virtual Connect, some of the same issues apply, but HP has offered at least one solution to administrators and security officers.  HP’s Virtual Connect technology does allow for a network mirror port which can replicate all traffic out for inspection, so even traffic that never leaves the enclosure thanks to the way Virtual Connect implements can be inspected and send alarms accordingly.  It may not be as good as an in-line security solution that can actively block malicious traffic, but at least administrators can gain visibility.

A More Intelligent Way to Manage Network Infrastructure

As part of our call last week, we were also shown HP’s Intelligent Management Center, or IMC.  This software is a control and monitoring software for heterogenous switches and routers in the datacenter all from a single, common interface.  IMC is an impressive offering from HP, which gives network administrators a single interface to learn to provision all of their switches.  With a hardware compatibility list of over 5,000 devices, the IMC is a capable platform to control both your HP, Cisco and other vendor’s network gear.

IMC addresses the problem of swivel chair management where administrators must monitor multiple, vendor-provided management products for each different vendor or product line represented in your datacenter.  But even for a company that has standardized on non-HP network gear, IMC is a powerful interface that can be put to work for them for more than just monitoring and management.

IMC is a modules that can be added in for user access management which can centralize user accounts with a full-featured RADIUS server that can be used 802.1X, VPN, and wireless authentication.  In addition the UAM module adds features to lock down and secure corporate devices by preventing IP and user account spoofing and prevent address conflicts.  The same package can also be used to lock down corporate PC’s to prevent use of USB and external storage devices.  Another module that plugs into IMC is Endpoint Admission Defense tools, which can be used to policy control clients and ensure that devices on the network are safe for the network, patched and have up to date antivirus definitions.

IMC provides a great view into virtualized networking (as in VMware) and can monitor the virtualized networking to a very granular level. It exposes what has been a black box of virtual networking using vendor provided API’s.    At present, IMC support VMware and Hyper-V but will grow to include XenServer and KVM in 2012, if things go as planned.

Recap

All in all, the entire series for the Blogger Reality Show has focused on ways to converge infrastructure for simplicity and ease of management.  Each of the HP offerings approaches convergence on different sections of the IT puzzle. In HP’s product line, we have seen the basic building blocks of convergence with servers and the Bladesystem, we have seen converged storage solutions built on x86 hardware, we have seen these solutions built into larger solutions for virtualization and cloud, and finally we have investigated the solutions HP has to converge and management networking.

The Reality Show has been a very cool thing to take part of.  From a blogging perspective, it has been very cool to get judges feedback and to learn and stretch myself by trying new ways to promote the blog and posts.  The winner will be named next week at VMworld and I’ll try to post an expanded post about the contest after we wrap next week.  So, now it is your turn again…  Vote and comment.

This is the third and final post for Thomas Jones’ Blogger Reality Show sponsored by HP and Ivy Worldwide. I ask that readers be as engaged and responsive as possible during this contest.  I would like to see comments and conversations that these entries spark, tweets and retweets if it interests you and I also request that you vote for this entry using the thumbs up/thumbs at the top of this page.  As I said earlier, our readers play a large part in scoring, so participate in my blog and all the others!

Unfortunately, when multiple vendors’ products are coupled together as a solution, support can become nasty as vendors point back and forth at each other while trying to get to a resolution.  The more complex the solution, for instance a SAN, the more difficult to troubleshoot through the multiple layers of software, firmware and hardware, even multiple vendors of the solution.  And, I believe, the hassle has made customers seek a better way.

Finding a better way

In my employer’s case, they chose to standardize with a single vendor long before I joined the staff.   We have stuck with servers and storage hardware from the single vendor, including their certified part upgrades (no third party upgrade components).  We chose to do this to simplify our support and avoid finger-pointing.

The vendor we standardized with was HP, and the reason was that they offered an entire line of products under their umbrella to meet our needs.  By the time I joined the staff in 2006, we were already HP heavy, except where a specific Unix was required by another vendor.   What we wanted as a customer was the quickest and easiest route  to a resolution, with the least resistance and finger-pointing, when a problem came up.  Even beyond the hardware solutions, HP has handled our software support for Microsoft, RedHat and VMware for many years.  We wanted this because the software companies could not finger point at the hardware or vice versa – HP was doing it all.  Sure, it might happen between teams in HP occasionally, but we could easily escalate our case and have a manager bring this to a resolution.  It has worked well for our needs.

Having all this expertise in-house is an advantage that HP is now branding under the name “Converged Systems” or the “Instant-On Enterprise”.  Earlier this week, I attended a webinar for the Blogger Reality Contest where HP unpacked more of its converged solutions strategies.  HP is bringing together all of the pieces spread throughout its portfolio into specialized solutions.  Its not a new concept, in my opinion, but one that some customers have been already using for years on their own.  HP has improved on this by tweaking configurations  to squeeze performance out of configurations and adding software to ease installation and management of the solutions.

Building Upwards – HP VirtualSystem

HP introduced VirtualSystem in June as a modular, easy and quick way to implement virtualization in customer datacenters.  The VirtualSystem solution is a full package of storage and compute resources plus the software tools to quickly and easily deploy a virtual stack in an environment.

For HP VirtualSystem, the key benefits are:

• Quick built out timeframe
• Automation through Insight Control suite components
• Monitoring through the Insight Dynamics suite components
• Improved virtual machine performance, cost and scale due to purpose built hardware
• Ability to upgrade to CloudSystem for fully automated IT
• Single point of contact for support – HP for compute, storage and software, including hypervisor

HP VirtualSystem comes in 3 levels (shown below).  The VS1 is built out using rack-mount, Proliant hardware for both the server hosts and for the storage and features a P4000 series iSCSI storage array.  It is rated to handle up to 750 virtual machines and can scale up to 8 physical hosts.  The VS2 is built out using HP BladeSystem with a P4800 iSCSI storage array (covered in depth last week).  It is rated for up to 2500 virtual machines and can scale up to 24 physical hosts.  The third offering is the VS3 which is built on HP BladeSystem and the 3PAR Utility Storage platform to provide ultimate scale and performance.  VS3 introduces fiber channel storage capability and scales up to 6000 virtual machines with up to 64 hosts.

In terms of choice, VirtualSystem supports all three major hypervisors from VMware, Microsoft and Citrix.  Using my company as an example again, the multi-hypervisor datacenter already exists.  We are utilizing VMware vSphere heavily and then some Citrix XenServer.  When it came to planning upgrades for our aging MetaFrame/XenApp farm, we looked at virtualization.  As we evaluated XenServer, we found it to be “good enough” for running Citrix XenApp on top of it.  XenApp has its own failover and redundancy built into the application layer, so many of the VMware advanced features did not matter.

For VirtualSystem, HP is also handling all support for both the hardware and software for these solutions.  Having experience with HP’s software support teams, I can report that they do a good job at it.  I would not say they are always perfect, but in general, they have solved our issues and advised us well, so in reality this is a big benefit.  For those who want not on break/fix support, HP offers Proactive 24 Services for an additional level of preventative support.

Building to the cloud – HP CloudSystem

As I learned at HP Discover, just because you have a large virtualization pool in your datacenter does not mean you have a private “cloud.”  The critical difference between a virtual infrastructure and a cloud is orchestration and automation.  Built on top of HP VirtualSystem, HP CloudSystem is a solution that offers all of the necessary orchestration, service catalog and workflows to turn virtual infrastructure into a true cloud.  There is a clear and clean upgrade path from VirtualSystem into CloudSystem.  And for those starting fresh or who want to evaluate the HP solution, there is even an HP CloudStart service which will deliver a rack with CloudSystem into their datacenter and have it fully operational in 30 days or less.

CloudSystem is offered in three levels: CloudSystem Matrix, CloudSystem Enterprise and CloudSystem Service Provider.  CloudSystem Matrix is targeted towards those looking to automate the private cloud, customers who are looking to add automation and orchestration to their existing virtual systems.  It provides infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and basic application provisioning in minutes.  CloudSystem Enterprise extends upon Matrix and allows for private and hybrid cloud, enabling the bursting of workloads to public cloud.  It is a platform for hosting not only IaaS, but Platform as a Service (Paas) and Software as a Service (SaaS).  CloudSystem Enterprise provides application and infrastructure lifecycle management and allows for management of traditional IT resources in addition to virtualized resources.   The CloudSystem Service Provider edition extends upon the Enterprise edition and allows for multiple tenants on a single infrastructure, securely without exposing customer data between customers.  It is intended to host public and hosted private clouds for customers.  The editions in CloudSystem are more about capabilities and less about limits, compared to VirtualSystem.

Since automation and orchestration is the key of CloudSystem, that is where I wanted to focus.  The base of CloudSystem is the Matrix Operating System, which is the same combination of HP software found in the HP VirtualSystem solution.  On top of the Matrix Operating System, the CloudSystem Matrix solution includes Cloud Service Automation for Matrix.  This software includes Server Automation for lifecycle management for physical and virtual assets via a single portal and set of processes and HP SiteScope, an agent-less monitoring solution for performance and availability.

The enterprise and service provider editions include a beefed up version called, simply, Cloud Service Automation.  It includes the entire orchestration, database and middleware automation pieces of the pie and a cloud controller software.  These additional pieces allow not only the automatic and streamlined provisioning of physical and virtual servers but also the provisioning of the required glue that sits in between the apps and the servers.  The diagram below from HP shows all the moving parts of Cloud Service Automation better than I can explain in words.  And because, Cloud Service Automation is total lifecycle management, there are the pieces for monitoring and performance management which would be needed.  In addition, the centralized portals serve as point for both end users and IT professionals to manage the cloud.

Cloud Maps are another feature of CloudSystem and these are predefined automation workflows for deploying software and platforms easily.  These are the piece of the puzzle that allows for improved deployment times and also allow for drag and drop creation of new workflows and processes in the cloud.  HP has worked with its software partners to create these maps of requirements and automate the process of deploying their solutions.

Beyond all of the capabilities, HP is working hard to make this an open solution by making it compatible to burst workloads into third party clouds, whether its Amazon’s EC3 or a vCloud service provider.  This was a point stressed during the announcements at HP Discover and during the call on Tuesday.

This is post number two for Thomas Jones’ Blogger Reality Show sponsored by HP and Ivy Worldwide. I ask that readers be as engaged and responsive as possible during this contest.  I would like to see comments and conversations that these entries spark, tweets and retweets if it interests you and I also request that you vote for this entry using the thumbs up/thumbs at the top of this page.  As I said earlier, our readers play a large part in scoring, so participate in my blog and all the others!

This isn’t the first time I’ve written about CloudSystem.  In June,  I posted about my take on CloudSystem Service Provider from a potential service provider’s perspective.  I encourage you to take a look at that post, too, after you take a minute to comment and/or vote on this post.

Converge.  That theme is a tougher sell in my employer’s environment.  There is resistance to converging, whether it’s IP telephony on our data network versus converging our fiber channel with fiber channel over Ethernet and putting it on our same core Ethernet network.  Same would go for iSCSI, if we had it.  We tend to separate for simplicity reasons, but there are certainly cost savings in convergence.

 Why converge?

Convergence is a major trend in IT, today, although it goes by many names.  But like most trends and buzzwords (think Cloud), your mileage will vary among vendors and interpretations of the buzz.  HP’s approach to convergence is largely centered around standardized x86 hardware for both server and storage platforms.  In addition, the converged storage platforms within HP are about scale out, with multiple controllers to handle unpredictable and unruly disk I/O with ease.

Before moving into a discussion of converged storage, though, it is worth taking a moment to talk about how things have been done in the past.  For the past 20 years, storage has been largely created around a monolithic model.  This model consisted of dual controllers and shelves of JBOD’s for capacity.  The entire workload and orchestration of the array was trusted to the controllers.  With the traditional workloads, the controllers performed well.  In the old world, capacity was the limitation on data arrays.

Today, the demands of virtualization and cloud architectures on storage have considerably changed the workloads.  The I/O is unpredictable and burst large amounts of traffic to the arrays.  This is not what our traditional arrays were designed for and the controllers were paying the price.  In a large number cases, including my company, the controllers become oversubscribed before the capacity of the disks are exhausted so you don’t realize your full investment. Monolithic arrays come with a high up-front price tag.  When one is “full”, it is a big hassle and cost to bring in a new array and migrate. But these have been the work horses of our IT operations.  They are trusted.

Hitting the wall

Within the past couple years, I have found the limitation of the controllers to be a significant problem within our environment.  And even after significant upgrades to high-end HP EVA within our company, we can still see times when the disk I/O overwhelms our controllers to a point that disk latency increases and response slows.

The controller pain points are one of the driving forces behind converged storage.  Converged storage is the “ability to provide a single infrastructure, that provides with server storage and networking and rack that in a common management framework,” says Lee Johns, HP’s Director of Converged Storage.  “It enables a much simpler delivery of IT.”

What is different with converged storage?

Across the board, convergence leverages standardized, commodity hardware to lower costs and improve the ability to scale out.  Converged storage is about taking those same x86 servers and creating a SAN that can adapt to the demands of today’s cloud and virtualization.  Instead of the limitations of a single set of controllers, intelligently clustered server nodes enables each server in the array to serve as a controller.

Through distribution of control, the cluster is able to handle the bursts of I/O more easily across all of its members than a monolithic array controller is able.  The software becomes the major player in the array operations and it really is a paradigm shift for storage administrators.  No longer is storage a basic building block, it is just another application running on x86 hardware.

Diving deep into the HP P4800 G2 SAN solution

Perhaps the best way to understand converged storage is to look at a highly evolved converged data array.  On Tuesday, Dale Degen, the worldwide product manager for the HP P4000 arrays, introduced our blogger crew to the P4800 G2, built on HP’s C7000 Bladesystem chassis.

The core of the LeftHand Networks and now P4000 series arrays is the SAN/iQ software.  The SAN/iQ takes individual storage blade servers and clusters them into an array of controllers. This clustering allows for scale out as you need additional processing ability to handle the workload.  Each of the storage blades is connected to its own MDS-600 disk enclosure via a SATA switch on the interconnect bays of the blade center.  The individual nodes of the array mirror and spread the data over the entire environment.  One of the best things about the SAN/iQ software is its ability to replicate to a different datacenter and handle seamless failover if one site is lost.  (Today, in my fiber channel world, if I lose an array, it involves presentation changes to bring up my replica from another EVA, so this is a huge plus.)

By leveraging the HP Bladesystem for the P4800 G2, you can also leverage its native abilities, such as the shared 10Gb Ethernet interconnects and Flex-10.  For blades in the same chassis with the P4800, the iSCSI traffic never has to leave the enclosure and it is allowed to flow at speeds up to 10Gb (unless you have split your connection into multiple NICs).

From an administrative standpoint, the P4800 is managed just like any other blade server in the C7000 enclosure.  These blades are standard servers, except that they include the SATA interface cards.  They include standard features like iLO (Integrated Lights Out) management, VirtualConnect for Ethernet network configuration, and the Onboard Administrator for overall blade health and management.

Within a single chassis, the P4800 can scale up to 8 storage blades (half of the chassis).  The iSCSI SAN is not limited to presentation within the same C7000 or within the BladeSystems at all.  It is a standard iSCSI SAN which can be presented to any iSCSI capable server in the datacenter.

The P4800 G2 is available in two ways.  For customers new to the C7000, they may purchase a factory integrated P4800 G2 and C7000 chassis together.  For existing customers with a C7000 and available blade slots, the P4800 G2 can be integrated with the purchase of blades, SATA interconnects and one or more MDS-600 disk enclosures.  For existing customers, you must also purchase the installation services for the P4800 G2.

The P4800 is a scale up technology also.   Customers do not need to migrate everything at one time.  It allows for a single infrastructure and allows you to move onto it over time by adding additional storage blades and MDS-600 disk enclosures.

As a quick side note, this is the first entry for Thomas Jones’ Blogger Reality Show sponsored by HP and Ivy Worldwide. I ask that readers be as engaged and responsive as possible during this contest.  I would like to see comments and conversations that these entries spark, tweets and retweets if it interests you and I also request that you vote for this entry using the thumbs up/thumbs at the top of this page.  As I said earlier, our readers play a large part in scoring, so participate in my blog and all the others!

Early on, I got a taste of success (particularly for a blogger with NO following) by blogging during VMworld 2008 about the announcements being made from VMware.  It was the first time I had content picked up and linked to from others, and I’ll admit, it felt good.  To this day, my blog still gets some traffic from web searches about VMware’s Fault Tolerence feature.

Those early results did not turn into overnight success.  After VMworld 2008 and 2009, the blog has received relatively low numbers of visits, participation and readership. I allowed it to languish with only a few updates here and there.  The growth has been relatively slow, but recently doors are opening up.  Opportunities, like attending HP Discover and the Blogger Reality Contest, are allowing me to attend great networking and technical events,  to report on great new technology being introduced, and to refine my skills as a blogger.  The future for this blog is looking as bright as ever and I just wanted to to take time to thank those involved for the opportunities, support and encouragement.

1) Leave a comment below with how you would use a HP Proliant MicroServer in your home or business.  The winner will be randomly selected from the approved comments using SQL and a seeded number I have pre-chosen.

2) Tweet one (or both) of the following during the contest to promote it.

Win a #HP Proliant MicroServer from Tech Talk & @pbsellers with the most inventive idea how to use it. http://wp.me/p1zPhE-kf #techtalkgiveaway

I want to win a #HP Proliant MicroServer from Tech Talk & @pbsellers! I know how I’d use it. Do you? http://wp.me/p1zPhE-kf #techtalkgiveaway

The prize will be awarded on July 8, 2011.  Contest ends at midnight, eastern daylight time, on July 7, 2011. All project plans should be posted in the comments, below, before that date.  Please include an email address in the field required so that I may contact you (the email address will not be publicly available).

The HP Proliant MicroServer is a home or small/medium business server with a small footprint.  It is energy efficient, quiet and scales up to 8GB of RAM and 8TB of storage.  The giveaway includes an upgraded model with a dual-core 1.3 Ghz AMD Athlon II NEO processor, 3GB of RAM, a DVD-ROM drive, 250GB hard drive and 3 years of 4 hour response 13 x 5 support from HP.  This package is valued at $600.  For more information, see the HP Proliant MicroServer Datasheet and the video below.

Intel created the Cloud Builder program to invite industry partners into its research facility to experiment and create reference architectures in the lab to publish to customers. Cloud Builders is not about certifying the hardware, it is about creating references for customers who are looking to be a particular type of cloud. One reason Intel is not seeking certification is that cloud technology is changing at a very rapid pace and certification process would take an extended amount of time, during which technology would have already changed.

Cox said that Intel has really focused on building the private cloud model. Intel surveyed its end-user enterprise customers and came up with a list of use cases to focus on with its partners.

While researching with its partners, Intel has been able to find some gaps in technology, particularly in the case of management software for the cloud. But the research has also turned up other gaps, such as trusted compute pools and missing audit information that would be required for compliance.

Intel has also been working on technology such as the hardware root of trust which allows for hypervisors to send a request to the Intel hardware in plain text and receive an encrypted, signed response certifying that the response is coming from the trusted hardware. This was technology that had not found a use case, but in compliance heavy environments, its finally finding implementation.

Auditing has also been difficult to produce for these environments. This is an area that Intel and its partners are still focusing.

For more information about Cloud Builders and to find details about the reference architectures published, head over to http://www.intelcloudbuilders.com.

In the interest of full disclosure, HP and Ivy Worldwide invited me and paid for my trip to HP Discover. Even though, I am trying to relay the information as impartially as possible.

Day to day, I work for a telephone company, though we are really much more – we sell cable TV, wireless, landline, Internet, security and home automation.  [Disclaimer - these are my views and not theirs.]  We have tossed around the idea of becoming a public cloud provider more than once.  Last week, during HP Discover, I got my first full view of how we might realistically do that.  We are not currently a HP CloudSystem customer, but I could see it fitting our needs.

HP unwrapped CloudSystem during the Discover conference in Las Vegas.  CloudSystem is a full stack solution from storage, to networking, to servers and software to enable the cloud, whether it be private, public (service provider) or hybrid.  So, where to begin on discussing CloudSystems – lets start with a definition.

What is the cloud?

To begin, this is a grey area.  Cloud means many things to different people.  Most agree, however, that cloud computing and virtualization are not the identically the same.  In many people’s minds, the two are synonymous – mine included – until I really dug into the topic in recent weeks.  I think the VMware, because it is pushing the cloud and because it is known for virtualization has helped further this incorrect concept.

The difference between cloud and virtualization is that cloud computing has a management software layer to enable provisioning of services.  Cloud computing includes a level of automation and management.  In HP’s solution, cloud doesn’t necessarily mean virtualization, although its heavily utilized.    The key to cloud is automation.

Basis of the HP CloudSystem

From talking with an HP engineer in the HP Discovery Zone, I got a clearer picture of what makes CloudSystem tick.  The core of the HP CloudSystem is the HP Server Automation (SA) software package and, optionally, HP’s Rapid Deployment Pack (based on Altiris).  These two packages are designed to bring a level of automation to lifecycle of systems.  SA is used to take requests from end users, create and build out the systems, add the software packages to the base OS, and deploy it to users.  For lifecycle, SA is also used for patch management and change monitoring/mitigation.   The HP engineer I spoke with showed me how an application stack is built out on a newly provisioned system and how applications are added after the fact from a service catalog.

The key here is that the server build process is no longer a manual task for administrators, but rather a standardized task performed by the automation software.  The service catalog is key to making this happen and this is a mentality switch for many IT operations.  Gone are the days of checklists and manual point and click build-outs.  These are replaced with scripted installs for modular components.

The Service Provider’s Role

From a service providers perspective, there are two roles that we can play for customers.  The first is that of a hosting provider – where we fully house their IT operation in our public cloud.  The second is burst public hosting, or a hybrid approach.

The first model, the purely public cloud model, has been around as long as commercial web hosting has been available.  Since shared hosting arrived in the 1990′s, this business model of a for-rent data center, rack or server has housed the majority of websites on the internet.  The difference in cloud hosting, whether its Amazon EC3 or Terremark’s vCloud hosting, is the automation layer for customers.

For many customers, a public cloud only model may work.  But for larger companies with established IT departments, there are many cases where data is too confidential to be hosted in a public cloud, either because of compliance rules or security concerns.  This is where the second model, the hybrid or burstable cloud is coming into play.

The idea of burst is that companies can more “right-size” their infrastructures to handle their normal workload and then push additional resources into a public cloud for the times when their demand exceeds what they are capable of handling in-house.  A good example of this might be a college or university.   Computing resources required during registration increase drastically and as a result, the university spins up several additional registration web servers in the public cloud to accommodate the increased demand.  After registration, the public extension is decommissioned and all computing brought back to their private cloud.

In some cases, such as steaming media providers, they may want a hybrid deployment with a source streaming server and redirector or proxy services in several public clouds to push the workloads out to be handled in several data centers and spread their overall workload.  These are a couple really high-level (simple) concepts, but I think they help illustrate how this could work.

HP CloudSystem’s unique take

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Steve Dietch, VP of CloudSystem, at the Blogger’s Studio last Thursday as they discussed CloudSystem with a group of bloggers.  HP has created CloudSystem as an open cloud stack.  It is hypervisor agnostic, running VMware ESX, Microsoft’s Hyper-V or Citrix XenServer.  And, you are no locked to a single choice per CloudSystem – you can mix and match hypervisors within a CloudSystem deployment, running two or all three side by side.   To go even further, HP is supporting third party x86 servers and storage with their CloudSystem solution.

Unlike other vendor solutions, like vBlock, CloudSystem is not a single size solution.  It is a stack of which customers can pick and choose which components they need to compliment their existing infrastructure or it can be an entire stack purchased as a single SKU.  Deploying CloudSystem does not require you to discard your current infrastructure.

As HP is approaching converged infrastructure like CloudSystem, it is building these solutions out on industry standard (tried and true) hardware with millions of operational hours already logged on this hardware.  In this case, CloudSystem is an extension built on VirtualSystem which in turn uses BladeSystem as a basis.  So, although these are new offerings, they are not truly new.   CloudSystem Matrix is the software used for orchestration and automation in the CloudSystem solution.  This software was formerly known as BladeSystem Matrix, but rebranded to CloudSystem as the overall solution was assembled.

For storage, users can select either a P4000 (Lefthand) iSCSI array or a 3PAR array as the basis for CloudSystem.  Both are modern, fresh approaches to storage and both were designed to handle the unpredictable workloads of virtualized systems.

HP is still working on CloudSystem API’s which will interact with other public clouds to allow bursting and hybrid hosting, so that work is to be released, but the vision is to be able to host with a VMware vCloud provider or any other cloud provider.  They are really seeking to make this solution work with as many other cloud solutions as they can, which is what I would want as a customer.  HP is working hard to avoid single vendor lock-in, in some ways hedging bets on which hypervisor will ultimately win the war.

Finally, and most importantly in a service provider’s case, HP is offering solutions were they can host a public cloud for you in a turnkey solution, where a service provider can begin marketing and selling the solution while having it hosted in HP’s datacenter.  HP can provision your public cloud and hand over the keys for you to use in one scenario.

Disaster recovery (DR) is another scenario where HP’s hosted public cloud might make sense.  In my company’s case, we could bring a Service Provider edition of CloudSystem onsite and offer it as a public cloud to our customers utilizing our high speed network connections in our service area, but we could also replicate the cloud data to an HP datacenter as DR solution.  Since we are in a hurricane prone area, this is an appealing offer where we could assure our customers of DR failover to another geographical area.

All in all, I stand by my assessment that this is the most complete solution that I have seen to date.  I know that VMware has been working very hard to build out the entire stack and vCloud Director has certainly made big steps towards the service model, but VMware is still working on issues such as VM data transit to the public cloud.  HP will likely have the same issues in moving large VM hard disk images from on-premise to the cloud.  This pain point can be lessened when using a local provider with lots of bandwidth available to you, such as the case with my company.  This is still a fast changing area, but I am impressed by what HP introduced last week.

In the interest of full disclosure, HP and Ivy Worldwide invited me and paid for my trip to HP Discover.  Even though, I am trying to relay the information as impartially as possible.