Businesses operate in an increasingly complex and volatile global economic climate. While technology is continually advancing, business challenges only intensify, requiring IT managers and CIOs to do more with fewer resources and smaller budgets.
CIO’s face increasing pressure to optimize their network and meet expectations all while accelerating business growth, lowering costs and managing risk. While CIOs deal with immediate needs, their challenge is to adapt for tomorrow, improving business processes, enabling new business models and flipping their maintenance/innovation ratio.
Some vendors strive to optimize business but complicate networks in the process. Other vendors focus primarily on innovative solutions, but at the expense of organizational needs. As a result, an already complex network becomes harder to manage, which can cause businesses to lose focus on IT innovation.
Ethernet was not originally designed for use in a large scale virtualized data center. Consequently, designing a data center solely on Ethernet’s initial principles cannot address the needs of today’s data center. The explosion of large scale virtual environments has exceeded original Ethernet limits, forcing new innovation even on its base protocols. As a result, data center networks are now more complex than ever.
Ethernet now runs at up to 10,000 times its original 10 Mbps speed and includes full switching, built-in Quality of Service (QoS), bandwidth allocation, resiliency and virtualization technologies. The risk in this larger scale lies in hidden costs of managing the complexity of new capabilities vendors have provided and the inherent complexity it brings. Networking vendors must have a clear focus on creating innovative solutions that ultimately enable simplified, yet flexible networks.
Information-driven organizations need large, fast, flexible networks with intelligence that can adapt to changing business needs. A network must support application management, promote efficient maintenance and provide the ability to provision applications. The data center is no exception. Providing centralized control with the flexibility to deploy network policies and commands at the server edge is critical in enabling an organization to rapidly adapt to changing business and IT demands.
HP ProCurve Networking understands this need and offers a choice of adaptive enterprise solutions. Resilient core-to-edge connectivity, automated provisioning technologies and the new HP ProCurve 6120XG Blade Switch can reduce network complexity. Built on the HP ProCurve Adaptive EDGE Architecture (AEA), ProCurve enables flexible authentication at the network edge for future application deployment. Therefore, you don’t have to sacrifice existing capabilities and ease-of-use.
Converged computing and networks promise data, storage and communication delivery through a converged fabric across the enterprise. A converged infrastructure makes it possible to use a single wire for all enterprise applications and services. These might include voice-over-IP, video on demand and secure access to enterprise data.
HP is at the forefront: reducing data center network complexity and cost. Our newly converged blade switches and other networking technologies dramatically increase virtualization performance and network flexibility.
The new standards-based HP ProCurve 6120XG Blade Switch enables businesses to reduce network complexity and deliver investment protection with resilient core-to-edge connectivity. Designed for the HP BladeSystem c-Class enclosure, the 6120XG Blade Switch provides:
Perfectly suited for data center migrations to next generation 10-Gbps, high performance architectures, the 6120XG is engineered with emerging network standards in mind and is Converged Enhanced Ethernet- (CEE) ready.
When combined with the HP ProCurve DCM (Data Center Connection Manager), the switch delivers automated network connection management and provisioning. At the same time, it ensures consistency of bandwidth services throughout the data center.
Integrating HP ProCurve data center solutions into HP's BladeSystem reduces acquisition and operational expenses, space requirements and power consumption. Additionally, HP ProCurve solutions are backed by the HP ProCurve's Lifetime Warranty♦.
The newly enhanced capabilities of HP’s Virtual Connect further simplify the data center network, lower connectivity costs and enable flexible data center deployments.
Ideal for virtualization and other high-performance applications, Virtual Connect can provide twice the Fibre Channel bandwidth at a more cost-effective price. Businesses can dynamically change network connections, adjust bandwidth with the new HP Virtual Connect Firmware and update with HP Virtual Connect Flex-10. This combination reduces complexity and provides expanded support for up to 128 virtual local area networks.
Through this new shared, business-ready environment, HP offers IT capabilities that provide innovative services to the business. These converged infrastructure solutions can enable businesses to shift resources from technology administration to business innovation.
As the speed of technology accelerates, HP continues to invest in developing solutions that offer business-ready infrastructures with reduced complexity and lower cost of operation. Through a unique and refined combination of products, solutions, services and people, we continually evolve to meet the needs of business.
» Read about the five hidden network costs that could be hurting your business.