Virtualisation and optimisation are key to driving IT agility and creating a converged infrastructure that can be rapidly customised to meet changing business demand.

Our white paper, Empowering the Business with Agile IT, explores the strategies, best practices and HP technologies that will help your organisation facilitate growth, reduce costs and mitigate risk.

From network virtualisation and dynamic patching to intelligent power management and integrated blade systems, you will discover how to unlock greater business value from your datacentre.

Find out more

Enter your details to download a free copy of Empowering the Business with Agile IT

With market dominance in the server space and aggressive positioning in the storage arena, HP networking carved a niche as a complimentary networking footprint in primarily HP midsized environments. What HP may have lacked in the true enterprise space, it made up for in the BladeSystem arena with an endless stream of best of breed networking and connectivity innovations. However whilst well received, the HP ProCurve brand, used to market the end to end networking range, failed to propel HP into the minds of business critical network designers as the vendor to deliver enterprise, high availability solutions.

That is set to change with the recent acquisition of 3Com networking. Not only does this unlock a market validated enterprise class, business critical networking range (the 3Com H3C platforms) but also the market leading Tipping Point security product set. With a core networking functionality borne out of the enterprise and carrier grade design skills gained as one of the founder Ethernet product vendors, the 3Com range is market credible. Prior to the 3Com acquisition, HP had consolidated a position as the number two networking vendor in the market. As previously mentioned much of that market traction stemmed from strong mid market sales many stimulated by the lifetime warranty, implementation simplicity and integration with the wider HP product range.

The re-launched HP Networking brand now contains the best of all worlds with the H3C solution set aligned with high end enterprise customers married with legacy ProCurve platforms for the mid market and secured by the Tipping Point footprint. The HP ProCurve name is now gone and replaced by a clearer HP Networking brand.

This new approach to networking is a positive step for HP and could not only help to consolidate HPs number two position in the market but also open up new market segments previously aligned with competing vendors

Related Links:

To learn more about Computacenter’s Network Technology Optimisation services, please visit
http://www.computacenter.com/services/transform/network_technology_optimisation/

Learn More:

HP to Acquire 3Com for $2.7 Billion
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2009/091111xa.html

HP Finalises Acquisition of 3Com Corporation, Accelerates Converged Infrastructure Strategy
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2010/100412xa.html

The system – also known as Exadata – combines Oracle’s smart storage software and Sun hardware to deliver exceptional levels of database performance. It is also the first database machine to run transaction processing applications.

Organisations will be able to validate the benefits of migrating existing workloads to the new platform at Computacenter’s unique testing facility, the Solutions Centre.

Assessing the ROI

A long-term partner of both Oracle and Sun, Computacenter is well positioned to help businesses with their evaluation and implementation of the new technology.

Neill Burton, Datacentre Solutions Director at Computacenter, comments:

“By bringing together our software and hardware knowledge we can help clients understand the impact of Oracle’s integrated products, such as the Sun Oracle Database Machine. The expected performance of this technology is outstanding and we expect it to provide substantial benefits to clients looking to increase efficiency and reduce costs.”

According to Oracle, which acquired Sun last year, its new database machine will enable organisations to:

• Consolidate their database applications
• Make faster business decisions in real time
• Store up to 10 times more data
• Search data up to 10 times faster

“Using our proof of concept facilities at the Solutions Centre, businesses can validate these benefits based on their own workloads,” comments Burton. “As a result, they can clearly see the expected return on investment before making the decision to migrate.”

Sign up to free seminar

The Sun Oracle Database Machine is designed to increase data bandwidth between the database server and storage to overcome the limitations of conventional storage. It provides faster parallel data processing and less data movement through higher bandwidth connections, offering linear scalability and mission-critical reliability.

To provide customers with an introduction to the Sun Oracle Database Machine and its underlying technologies, we are organising two exclusive seminars. The events will explore how the system can help mitigate business risk and increase efficiency, and will include customer success stories.

The free half-day seminars will take place on 25th May in Edinburgh and 17th June in London. You can find out more details and register below:

• 25th May Edinburgh – register here
• 17th June London – register here

To find out more about Computacenter’s proof of concept services for the Sun Oracle Database Machine, email us at Optimised.Environment@computacenter.com or click here to read the press release.

The packaged virtualised datacentre solution was implemented at Computacenter’s unique testing facility, the Solutions Centre, at the beginning of April.

Based on EMC vMax data storage, EMC Ionix datacentre automation software, VMware server virtualisation, Cisco UCS universal servers, and Cisco 10GB Ethernet and virtualised networking solutions, VCE Vblock 2 is designed to deliver a fully optimised datacentre infrastructure.

Neill Burton, Datacentre Solutions Director at Computacenter, comments: “By maximising datacentre virtualisation disciplines, VCE Vblock 2 enables organisations to achieve greater cost savings and business agility. The solution also provides the flexible IT foundations needed to implement private clouds and shared services.”

Validate business impact and benefit

Computacenter’s deployment of VCE Vblock 2 provides organisations with a unique opportunity to validate these benefits and an integrated approach to creating a virtualised datacentre (VDC).

Matthew Yeager, Data Storage and Protection Practice Leader at Computacenter, comments: “The VCE Customer Demonstration Suite at the Solutions Centre will enable organisations to see VCE Vblock 2 in action and understand how it could benefit their business. A traditional datacentre approach and architecture increases costs and complexity while making service level agreements difficult to meet. By implementing an optimised environment based on a VDC solution, such as VCE Vblock 2, organisations can overcome these challenges and make IT more repeatable and flexible.”

VCE Vblock 2 can support up to 6,000 virtual machines and is a joint initiative between EMC, VMware and Cisco, who formed the Virtual Computing Environment coalition at the end of 2009.

VCE Vblock 2 is one of five vendor-backed VDC solutions that Computacenter can help customers evaluate, implement and manage.

“A VDC infrastructure is essential for alleviating the energy, resource and space constraints facing today’s datacentres,” comments Burton. “The Solutions Centre enables businesses to test and proof new datacentre systems and strategies prior to making any investment.”

The Solutions Centre is a multi-vendor testing facility comprises of eight secure and scalable proof of concept labs. The centre brings together more than 200 devices from 15-plus vendors.

To find out more about Computacenter’s VCE Vblock 2 evaluation services, email us at Optimised.Environment@computacenter.com.