What is virtualization?
Business is good, and the company is growing. So why isn't the IT staff smiling? It could be because they know that each new initiative, application, security measure, and business change often brings with it a new server for them to plan, deploy, provision, configure, monitor, patch, and manage. Not to mention that each new server demands space to locate it and other dedicated resources to get it up and running.
Growth can lead to server sprawl in any sized business. And the time, complexity, cost, and effort required to manage a rapidly growing datacenter can overwhelm the staunchest IT pros. Two approaches are proving invaluable in helping businesses regain control of their datacenters and consolidate servers into more manageable environments: virtualization and blade servers.
Virtualization
Virtualization technologies pool IT resources so that applications and services can share and more efficiently utilize them. Virtualization allows IT supply to dynamically shift to meet changing business requirements and spikes in demand.
For example, rather than operating and maintaining a separate Web server, e-mail server, and firewall server, a business could run all three of these as virtual machines on a single powerful server. Read more about virtualization in this Virtualization 101 article.
Blades
Blades are small-sized, modular servers that each have their own processors and memory. However, they share power supplies, cooling, interconnects, cabling, and storage. A blade server system densely packs multiple sever blades inside a standard enclosure.
Using this approach, a business could migrate their Web, e-mail, and firewall servers (along with a many others) onto blades that reside within a very small space, share resources, and reduce management costs.
Blade server consolidation benefits
What's really exciting is that these two consolidation solutions aren't mutually exclusive. A consolidation effort that uses virtualization within a blade server environment brings together the best of both approaches. It allows businesses of any size to:
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Control server sprawl – run an entire stack of applications and services on fewer, smaller machines-within the space of one standard rack. |
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Extend legacy environments – operate existing applications on newer, more powerful, easily managed servers. |
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Enable incremental growth – seamlessly increase capacity and change capabilities with additional blades, new virtual machines, or both. |
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Migrate at their own pace – move applications and resources on the schedule that makes sense for each unique business. |
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Match IT supply to business demand – dynamic allocation of virtualized resources balances workloads, improves utilization, and accommodates fluctuating demand without the traditional need to over-provision. |
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Improve high availability – redundant blades and virtual machines ensure availability of critical services. |
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Reduce complexity and cost – blade enclosures let blades share cabling, interconnects, power supplies, and cooling. |
HP BladeSystem
HP's BladeSystem uses virtualization technologies and advanced management tools to integrate computing, storage, power, and network resources into a virtualized, automated, self-aware environment. IT can manage the entire blade environment as easily as they would a single machine-with the aggregate computing power and pooled resources shared across applications.
In addition, HP BladeSystem offers:
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Unmatched flexibility – operate any combination within the same enclosure: AMD Opteron and/or Intel Xeon processors; single- and/or dual-processor; 32-bit and/or 64-bit; and single- and/or dual-core processors. |
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OS choice – run Linux, Windows or both as host operating systems as well as a number of other operating environments as guest OSs. |
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Simplified administration – HP Systems Insight Manager lets IT centrally manage blade servers, virtual machines, and standalone servers from a single interface. |
This combination of ease, flexibility and compatibility lets businesses specifically tailor HP BladeSystem environments to meet their precise requirements, and seamlessly expand, adjust, and reconfigure as those needs change. Its incredibly compact computing density gives growing businesses the headroom to accommodate rapid change and heavy demand within a very modest space-while reducing cost and burden to IT staff.
Read this IT Guide to learn more about how migrating to an HP BladeSystem gives your business all of the advantages of three leading-edge solutions: consolidation, blades, and virtualization.
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