HP Superdome 2: Ideal Mission-Critical Choice for Oracle-Sun SPARC and IBM POWER Replacement

Optimize and reduce costs in your data center by migrating from legacy Oracle-Sun SPARC and IBM POWER systems to HP Integrity Superdome 2

Technical white paper

Table of contents

Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 2

Migration Drivers ................................................................................................................................. 2 General migration drivers ................................................................................................................. 3 Oracle-Sun and IBM specific drivers ................................................................................................... 4

Why Migrate to HP? ............................................................................................................................ 5 Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 5 HP Superdome 2 .............................................................................................................................. 6 The HP Converged Infrastructure ...................................................................................................... 11 TCO Analysis ................................................................................................................................ 13 HP Migration Resources .................................................................................................................. 16

For more information .......................................................................................................................... 18

Call to action .................................................................................................................................... 18

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Introduction Faced with ongoing cost and efficiency pressures, many enterprises seek to reduce IT costs by tackling the inefficiencies and complexity of their legacy IT infrastructures.

The original data centers of the 1940’s and 1950’s were simple by today’s standards, with only a few significant infrastructure issues. Over the last 60+ years, the proliferation of servers has reached a feverish pace and many data centers are now encumbered with floor space, cabling, power and cooling, networking, and management challenges. Through all of these decades, one overarching issue has persisted and led towards much of today’s data center complexity. This issue is the discrete pairing of applications and platforms. The result is that many data centers are largely heterogeneous environments, facing the following issues:

• Complexity • Incompatibility requiring custom integration • Inflexibility • Difficult management • Too many isolated and underutilized servers • High and unpredictable ongoing cost

IT inefficiency and complexity is real; resources are tangled up in legacy applications and server silos that demand complex and custom infrastructures. Resources are sized for peak computing hours and often go underutilized. Adding in new applications, usually by manual provisioning, only increases the complexity. Because of this complex IT infrastructure and the ‘infrastructure baggage’ resulting from many years of sprawl, most organizations are spending upwards of 70% of their IT budget on operational costs, while business innovation is throttled down to 30%. Even worse, about half of this 30% is often allocated to application upgrade cycles. That leaves only about 15% of the budget for true innovation. Thus, it makes sense to look at IT operations as a logical choice for reducing cost and optimizing the data center.

The HP Converged Infrastructure is the HP Enterprise Business strategy and portfolio to help businesses overcome the challenges of IT sprawl and shift resources from operations to innovation. HP’s Converged Infrastructure provides a next-generation data center blueprint specifically designed to eliminate costly IT and application silos. This is accomplished by integrating and automating technologies into shared pools of interoperable resources aligned with business processes. HP Superdome 2, the flagship server for HP Converged Infrastructure, is the ideal mission-critical platform for customers seeking to migrate off of older SPARC and POWER servers. It is also ideal for legacy server consolidation, a proven methodology for reducing heterogeneous legacy sprawl in the data center. Its combination of processing power, I/O bandwidth, extreme reliability, virtualization, and shared modularity with other HP Converged Infrastructure platforms make it a cost effective solution for the next generation data center.

Migration Drivers In transforming data centers and solution platforms, migrations are a necessity. Fortunately, migrations from IBM and Sun are not a new phenomenon; they’ve been going on for the better part of 20 years. Thousands of migrations have occurred which have given rise to mature migration methodologies, tools, and expertise.

Before any migration can be considered, valid reasons must exist to justify the investment. Valid migrational drivers exist in both the business and technical areas of every corporation. Drivers that lead to migrations tend to revolve around solid objectives related to lowering computing cost and improving service levels.

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There are numerous drivers that apply to most IT shops, whether that shop has older Oracle-Sun SPARC servers or older IBM POWER servers. In addition to these drivers, common to both environments, there are compelling reasons to migrate specific to SPARC and POWER environments.

General migration drivers The following general drivers apply to both older Oracle-Sun SPARC servers and IBM POWER servers.

High support costs – Support costs for older systems are typically higher than the support costs for current systems. Has your warranty expired? If so, support costs may become a shock the day after warranty expiration.

HP Advantage: HP’s Superdome 2, as well as the entire HP BladeSystem hardware family, has excellent TCO compared to both older SPARC and POWER servers as well as newer ones. See the TCO Analysis section below for more detail.

End of Life – Have you reached, or are you soon to reach End of Life or End of Service dates on older versions of servers and software? Did the life cycle of the product appear too brief? Are costly upgrades the norm?

HP Advantage: HP can provide products with long life cycles and superior TCO when compared to legacy SPARC and POWER servers. HP is committed to a minimum of 5 years of sales plus 5 years of support equaling at least a 10 year life cycle for each OS release. The current OS, HP-UX 11i v3 offers a 13 year life. HP is committed to investment protection with its Integrity and Superdome platforms. In fact, the world’s first Superdome was introduced over 10 years ago. Today’s modern Superdome 2 will support 3 generations of processor innovations and will represent another stable, protected mission-critical investment for HP customers.

Underutilized servers – It’s common in older architectures to find dedicated servers that are not fully utilized or are only productively utilized a small percentage of the time. Dedicating one workload to each server meant that each server needed to be sized accordingly to accommodate the peak workload. Many servers tend to run lightly loaded, for the majority of time, outside of peak hours. The cost of carrying several of these systems is significant.

HP Advantage: Superdome 2 is an ideal consolidation platform. Using virtualization, partitioning, and utility computing can help reign in the cost of hosting business workloads.

Data center running out of floor space – The historic pairing of servers and applications for discrete solutions has led to a proliferation of servers dedicated to single tasks. Additionally, traditional networking adds a tremendous amount of redundant networking components and cabling. Thus, many data centers are running out of capacity.

HP Advantage: Superdome 2 is an ideal consolidation platform. HP FlexFabric creates a common, wired-once, virtual I/O network between servers, switches, and storage. FlexFabric‘s efficiency significantly reduces networking infrastructure.

Too many database instances – Database consolidation results from an initial state in which too many database instances exist. Most likely, ‘splitting the query workload’ enabled processing to be accomplished within accepted parameters. Numerous small data marts or numerous small ledgers are prime examples. Database sprawl takes up floor space, IT time, and ultimately increases cost.

HP Advantage: Once again, Superdome 2 is an ideal consolidation platform for large database environments with too many instances, particularly in mission-critical environments.

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Oracle-Sun and IBM specific drivers Oracle-Sun drivers Many of the more troublesome Oracle-Sun specific drivers listed below are outcomes of the last 8 years of hard times for SPARC servers.

Underperforming servers – With the steady slowdown in the evolution of the SPARC line, performance has been an issue for many years. Add to this the weight of underutilized servers, sized for peak workloads, and the drag on an IT operations budget can be significant.

HP Advantage: Comparative data using Alinean Ltd. and Ideas International Inc. shows a tangible HP advantage, especially in enterprise class servers. Ask your HP representative for a TCO analysis.

Too many Oracle licenses – It takes more UltraSPARC cores to run a comparable Oracle workload when compared to a Superdome 2.

HP Advantage: If your Oracle license is core-based, you can consolidate UltraSPARC servers and reduce the number of cores substantially which will reduce your Oracle licenses and database license maintenance cost. Additionally, by reducing UltraSPARC servers and cores, other valuable resources are freed up; floor space, power, cooling, networking, administration, and support costs.

The risks of a single vendor solution stack – Hosting an Oracle database on Oracle-Sun servers cedes control of the entire solution stack to Oracle. Could you be overspending on servers, software, and support by relying solely on Oracle-Sun?

HP Advantage: HP can provide a "whole environment" view with Superdome 2 in the Converged Infrastructure and best-of-breed partners to help you move to your next generation environment.

Escalating and changing support costs – Higher support costs for older SPARC systems, including new “mandatory” hardware support fees.

HP Advantage: Evaluating the support costs for Superdome 2 and other HP BladeSystem servers, relative to older SPARC support costs, can help you find ways to reduce operational support costs. Ask your HP representative for a TCO analysis.

Uncertainty with the high-end SPARC roadmap – The SPARC roadmap for the high-end servers is no longer as dynamic and evolutionary as in previous years. As Sun has had difficulties delivering new servers in the past, questions remain as to whether they can deliver in the future.

HP Advantage: The Intel® Itanium® 9300 processor and Superdome 2 are the latest in a decade of Intel Itanium processors and Superdomes. Additionally, two more Intel Itanium processors have been publicly announced and will appear in future Integrity Systems.

IBM drivers IBM has its own set of specific issues that have driven data centers to migrate from IBM servers frequently over the last 20 years.

High Cost of deployment, integration, and maintenance – Cost is an issue with architectures consisting of older POWER4 and POWER5 servers. IBM’s approach to computing technology does not lend itself well to simple deployment and integration. POWER servers have been created to interoperate very well in a POWER-only environment. Unfortunately, it is costly to integrate POWER servers with non-POWER servers (e.g. x86 servers), storage, networking, diverse management tools, and applications. This characteristic of the POWER server line results in higher costs for deployment, integration, support, maintenance, and ultimately upgrades to newer POWER servers. Unfortunately, when choosing a POWER-to-POWER upgrade, the high cost IBM lifecycle begins again and data centers are firmly locked into the same inflexible architecture.

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The IBM architectural silo model – The piecemeal nature of siloed POWER solutions (separate HA, separate networking, no standard management infrastructure, etc.) requires extensive and custom integration. Unfortunately, IBM mainframes and x86 servers subscribe to siloed architecture as well. The IBM approach to architectural design and component deployment forces customers to adapt their business operations to fit into IBM’s technology silos, such as mainframe or POWER servers. To implement cost-effective multi-tier computing infrastructures, customers must piece together their own enterprise architecture. By modern standards, this is a needless investment of development time and budget that can be better used for higher priority tasks.

Lack of solution flexibility – Instead of vendor guidance towards overcoming many of the legacy issues above, are you guided into upgrading the legacy environment instead of transforming it into a cost-effective and contemporary infrastructure? Being guided into an IBM-only siloed infrastructure philosophy solves only surface issues and can perpetuate cost and resource inefficiency.

HP Advantage: For the issues above, HP provides a "whole environment" view with Superdome 2 and best-of-breed partners to help you move to your next generation environment. HP Converged Infrastructure offers common building blocks – common bladed servers, both Integrity (e.g. Superdome 2) and ProLiant Xeon servers, common management software, common power and cooling, and a common network fabric.

Older POWER server processing and workload shortcomings – It should come as no surprise that, for many intense workloads, these older POWER4 and POWER5 systems lack the necessary processing, I/O bandwidth, and reliability. IBM’s message was also quite clear when they optimized the POWER architecture primarily for the OLTP workload. The OLTP workload does not have the same characteristics of mixed workloads or Business Intelligence (BI) workloads. Specific components, subsystems, and features are necessary to satisfy the intense I/O bandwidth and processing requirements of high volume BI workloads, mixed OLTP and BI workloads, and long running batch processing.

HP Advantage: Superdome 2 was specifically designed and optimized to process mixed workloads including the two most popular workloads, the mission-critical OLTP workload and the Business Intelligence workload. It contains, by conscious design, the necessary hardware and software components to excel at these business critical workloads.

Why Migrate to HP? Introduction Many businesses are currently involved in IT cost containment and lowering TCO. This can be accomplished by simplifying the data center. Taking development one step further leads to a modernization of IT infrastructure – eliminating silos, underutilized servers, piecemeal solutions, multiple management and networking tools and components, and complex, heterogeneous networking components. Superdome 2, the flagship server in HP’s Converged Infrastructure, can be deployed in all of the above steps to help simplify the IT infrastructure and contain cost. HP has developed the Converged Infrastructure over several years and the technologies that compromise this paradigm are tightly integrated with common components.

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HP Superdome 2 For over 10 years, HP Superdome—HP’s flagship, high-end Integrity server—has powered some of the world’s most demanding mission-critical environments. The current Superdome 2, with the new Intel Itanium Processor 9300 series, is the latest in this long line of servers. The Superdome line has been so successful that 2 more Intel Itanium processors are currently under development for future production.

Figure 1: Superdome 2

Tangible benefits can be achieved in migrating to HP Superdome 2 and HP Converged Infrastructure. For enterprise customers who require high availability, rich virtualization capabilities, and long-term investment protection, Superdome is the solution. With Superdome 2, HP pioneers a new category of modular, mission-critical systems, blending trusted Superdome reliability with BladeSystem efficiencies.

Superdome 2 is an integral part of HP’s Converged Infrastructure strategy which attacks IT sprawl with standards-based, modular architectures. For Superdome 2, this means a common, bladed architecture as well as common components and common management environment across all HP servers. The result is a Superdome that is modular, modern, and easier to manage than ever before.

HP Advantage: Superdome 2 is the latest in a long line of successful mission-critical enterprise servers. It has a lengthy, stable, and public roadmap including two more Intel Itanium Processors under development.

Intel Itanium 9300 Processor Series – At the heart of Superdome 2 is the innovative sx3000 enterprise systems chipset, extending Superdome 2 reliability and availability to new levels. The core of the chipset is the Intel Itanium processor 9300 series, a quad core processor, which delivers more than double the performance of the previous generation 9100 series. A new set of reliability and availability features have also been added to the 9300 to boost the extreme mission-critical nature of the Superdome 2.

To help extend the life of an IT server investment, the 9300 Series processor is socket-compatible with 2 future Intel Itanium processors, already in development.

Performance The Intel Itanium processor 9300 series delivers more than double the performance of the previous generation 9100 series processor.

Superdome 2 allows you to scale as you grow. 8-socket and 16-socket servers are initially available, providing up to 64 cores of compute power. A 32-socket starter package is also available containing two 16-socket servers in a single rack. A simple, affordable upgrade kit will be available to convert this configuration to a 32-socket SMP system.

I/O Bandwidth For High I/O bandwidth workloads such as are found in data warehousing and data marts, Superdome 2 supports up to 48 external PCIe x8 Gen2 I/O slots at first release. Up to 96 slots will be supported when the 32-socket server is released.

HP Advantage: Not only is the Superdome 2 designed for transaction processing but also for high I/O bandwidth workloads such as Business Intelligence.

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Modular scalability Superdome 2 has been designed so that key resources are modular in nature and can be added modularly as needed.

Manageability HP offers a common management interface across all BladeSystem servers, including those powered by Intel Itanium and Intel® Xeon® processors.

HP Advantage: A common management interface for the entire data center reduces complexity, reduces time to operation, increases commonality across solutions, and reduces cost.

Insight Dynamics Insight Dynamics serves as a common management platform for all BladeSystem servers, including the flagship Superdome 2, HP Systems Insight Manager with HP Insight Dynamics and HP Insight

Dynamics-VSE enables management of physical and virtual servers, networking, and storage from a single pane of glass—enabling users to provision and manage any system component with ease.

Superdome 2 Analysis Engine An innovation unique to HP, the Superdome 2 Analysis Engine delivers predictive analysis and error handling to reduce the complexity, time investment, and cost of error management.

HP-UX Data Center Operating Environment (DCOE) The HP-UX operating system has a long history of supporting mission-critical environments. Today, HP-UX and HP Integrity servers support 81 of the Global 100 enterprises. HP-UX 11i is deployed in different Operating Environments (OEs)—HP tested and integrated software packages that deliver the HP-UX 11i operating system and related software with the choice of tools needed in your IT environment.

Advantage HP: OEs reduce time, risk, and cost through integration that improves deployment time, reduces complexity, simplifies lifetime maintenance, and reduces operational costs. The need for expensive and time consuming consulting is no longer needed to deploy new solutions into the data center.

The Data Center OE is a complete product set for supporting applications in the mission critical data center. Key capabilities include

• Base OE: HP-UX, one of the leading commercial UNIX® operating systems • High Availability OE: HP Serviceguard for failover clusters, including failover, disaster recovery and

remote clustering • Virtual Server OE: HP's Virtual Server Environment for partitioning, virtual machine management,

workload management, capacity planning, and the complementary software.

The combination ensures uninterrupted and optimized support for mission-critical applications.

Reliability Many reliability and availability features are built into Superdome 2, the HP-UX operating system, and associated software. Superdome 2 owes its mission-critical qualities to the integration of all these components.

Downtime costs the business. HP understands this and has designed Superdome 2 with mainframe-grade reliability and availability features at a fraction of the cost.

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Hardware • Intel Itanium processor 9300 Series - HP uses Intel’s most reliable processor, the Intel Itanium

processor 9300 series to drive its mission critical line of Integrity servers. Some of the RAS features of the Intel Itanium processor 9300 series include multiple levels of error correction code (ECC), parity checking, and Intel Cache Safe Technology.

• Fault tolerance in 100% of chipset data paths • Fault tolerant Crossbar Fabric – can survive a complete crossbar failure, reroute data, and recover

immediately • Dynamic Processor Resiliency - DPR monitors and will flag a processor as degraded when it has

experienced a certain number of correctable errors over a specific time period. These thresholds help identify processor modules which are likely to cause uncorrectable errors in the future that can panic the OS and bring the system or partition down. DPR effectively “idles” these suspect CPUs (deallocate), and marks those CPUs to not be used (deconfigured) on the next reboot cycle.

• Redundant I/O paths • Redundant links to Blades • Electrical isolation of hard partitions • Double chip sparing • Hot swapping capabilities: power, fans, PCIe cards, clock, crossbars, etc.

Advantage HP: There are far more reliability and availability hardware and firmware components built into a Superdome 2 than into a SPARC or POWER server. Ask an HP representative for an availability and reliability evaluation to fully understand the features and comparisons against your existing systems.

Serviceguard As part of its HP-UX Data Center Operating Environment (DCOE), HP Serviceguard Solutions offer a suite of high availability and disaster recovery capabilities. Serviceguard, the foundation product of the portfolio, uses virtualization to maintain service levels by managing the details of exactly where applications and services are physically running at each moment. Using Serviceguard, IT staffs define “packages” that contains a database or an application along with all of its required resources. Any database or application can be incorporated in these packages, using the Serviceguard integration kit. If failover between multiple data centers is required for even greater reliability, MetroCluster and Continental Cluster built upon Serviceguard offers multiple disaster recovery options.

HP Advantage: The integration of Serviceguard into HP-UX contrasts with IBM, where custom services are generally required to accomplish close to the same functionality.

Serviceguard then monitors these packages for faults; hardware, OS, software, virtualization layer, network, storage, etc. If a fault is detected, Serviceguard automatically initiates a local application restart or a failover sequence to a new mode, either physical or virtual. A failover sequence will relocate a database or an application and any of its dependent resources as needed. These failover sequences can also be applied to reduce downtime for planned maintenance and upgrades.

Partitioning and Virtualization Superdome 2 supports a wide array of partitioning options. Each partitioning strategy splits up the resources in the server (CPUs, memory, I/O) into independent servers that can each run an operating system instance.

Partitioning and virtualization are pivotal for migrations that are driven by consolidation efforts of older, costly, underutilized, or siloed servers.

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The major partitioning strategies available on Superdome 2 are:

• nPartitions An nPartition is an electrically isolated hard partition with security provided in the hardware. Secure firmware configures the sx3000 fabric to isolate resources in an nPartition from the rest of the system. This creates a hardware firewall to prevent other operating system instances from disrupting that partition. The firewall also minimizes the chance that a single failure (in hardware or software) can take down multiple partitions, for example an I/O card failure in one partition does not impact other partitions. This is a required feature in order to perform hardware maintenance on one partition while the other partitions continue to operate. The size of an nPartition can range from a single blade to the entire system. Up to 16-socket electrically isolated nPars, vPars, and HPVMs are supported. Superdome 2 servers also allow users to further virtualize the resources allocated to an nPartition.

• vPars A vPar runs within an nPartition. vPars offers partitioning granularity down to the CPU-core, memory slice, and PCIe card. As a new feature in Superdome 2, vPars do not require OS vPars monitor and suffer no performance penalties. In Superdome 2 systems, vPars allow multiple instances of HP-UX to execute in parallel without the overhead of hypervisors.

• HPVM HP Integrity Virtual Machines (HPVM) runs within an nPartition. HPVM offers additional flexibility with built-in dynamic resourcing by sharing processor cores and I/O between Virtual Machines. Dynamic partitioning drastically reduces the amount of resources, especially CPU resource, which are required for consolidating multiple workloads. HPVM offers sub-CPU-core partitioning granularity.

• SRP HP-UX Secure Resource Partitions (SRP) provides a lightweight workload deployment environment that enables you to consolidate multiple workloads within a single instance of the HP-UX 11i operating system. SRP facilitates the stacking of multiple applications within a single HP-UX 11i operating system image. SRPs provide built-in dynamic resourcing by sharing of processor cores and I/O and offers granular resource control, permitting applications to run in as little as one percent of a processor core. Increased security is achieved by ensuring that a process running in one SRP cannot communicate with processes in another SRP unless specifically allowed by the system administrator.

Partitioning as used for Migrational Consolidation Server consolidation is a practice that is often applied to data centers with older Oracle-Sun and IBM servers in order to reduce IT costs. Superdome 2 has often been a primary vehicle for large consolidation projects in just these types of data centers. Server consolidation enables a user to replace a large number of discrete systems with a smaller number of partitioned servers. Benefits of consolidation include reduced hardware costs, reduced application and OS licensing fees, fewer OS instances to manage, and reduced facilities costs. Superdome 2 with partitions makes it easier and faster to implement a new application when compared to implementing an application on a stand-alone server. For the most part, provisioning of a new stand-alone server usually requires making a purchase, or at least allocating a resource, whereas adding a new partition to an existing system is quickly accomplished.

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Superdome 2 servers are the ideal target for server consolidation initiatives. Each blade, which is the building block of nPartitions, is a fully isolated computing unit. As compared to competitors’ systems, where cache coherency traffic continues to flow between partitions thereby creating potential single points of failure and unwanted performance interactions, Superdome 2 systems keep nPartition local coherency traffic entirely within the blades of the nPartition. In addition to significantly reducing the risk of a hardware failure affecting more than one nPartition, this increases the performance of a partitioned system.

HP Advantage: Superdome 2 enables true server consolidation. Leveraging HP’s two generations of hard partitioning experience, a customer can be assured that a Superdome 2 server broken up into hard partitions is an excellent approximation of an array of smaller boxes, without all the system management, reliability, and cost of ownership headaches.

Utility Pricing Solutions HP offers two types of utility pricing solutions: Pay Per Use (PPU) - intended for companies to address widely varying capacity requirements, yet maintain the flexibility to pay for server capacity based on actual IT usage, and Instant Capacity (iCAP) - for companies responding to rapid growth or predictable temporary demand.

Pay Per Use (PPU) HP Pay Per Use (PPU) metering system for HP Superdome 2 and Integrity servers offers real-time access to reserve capacity without having to pay for that capacity when not in use. The system measures how much capacity your organization uses and bills you—if you use less, you pay less. In addition, HP caps the total payments to ensure you will never pay more than you would for a comparable lease. It also provides utilization detail you can use to bill back internal or external organizations.

HP Advantage: Peak and slack workloads are a facet of every data center and the traditional sizing methodology dictates a server large enough to accommodate a peak workload that may lie relatively idle during slack workload times. PPU is a welcome alternative to sizing systems for peak workloads. Using PPU with Superdome 2 in the data center avoids both overbuilt and underutilized servers.

Instant Capacity (iCAP) Instant Capacity offers a method of instant processor provisioning as well as temporary processor provisioning. Both features are efficient and effective for a cost conscious data center. No longer do you have to overprovision a server from day one, or go through a manual process to add processors at inconvenient times.

HP offers three types of iCAP:

• Instant Capacity for HP Integrity Superdome 2 blades and memory HP iCAP provides the capability to quickly add cores and memory capacity when needed while paying only a fraction of the cost until used.

• Temporary Instant Capacity (TiCAP) HP TiCAP provides pre-purchased processing time, which can be used to turn cores on and off as needed.

• Global Instant Capacity (GiCAP) HP GiCAP allows IT to share iCAP usage rights among a group of servers, enabling more cost-effective disaster recovery and high-availability, more efficient use of data center resources, and more flexibility in resource utilization.

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HP Advantage: HP iCAP is a flexible and powerful tool that matches compute resources to application loads in a dynamic manner, which saves money and provides a fast response to changing business requirements. Compare this to a data center full of hard-configured and underutilized SPARC and POWER servers, all sized for peak workloads and one database or application.

The HP Converged Infrastructure Having identified the need for hardware and solution migration, it’s also logical to take stock of your entire current IT architecture and investigate what an ideal IT infrastructure would like and what it would take to achieve that architecture. It is imperative that legacy issues be resolved and not repeated; IT has to evolve or face expensive stagnation.

A modern enterprise infrastructure implies IT unification through data center convergence. Built on innovation, standards, and choice, the HP Converged Infrastructure is the modern paradigm for achieving this data center of the future. HP is soundly positioned to deliver the Converged Infrastructure to its customers, with a full portfolio of integrated solutions and services developed for modern, unified data centers.

Unification is a central theme of the HP Converged Infrastructure. Common components span HP bladed servers (both Integrity and ProLiant), HP storage, and HP networking.

• A common modular infrastructure with common building blocks • Common power and cooling • A common network fabric • Common management software

Figure 2: Converged architectural framework

Power & cooling

ServersStorage

Management software

Network

Converged Infrastructure

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This converged architectural framework simplifies, integrates, and automates technology:

• Simplifies the infrastructure and reduces TCO • Lowers the cost of deployment and implementation by obviating the need for expensive and lengthy

integration and interoperability consulting • Removes server silos and server sprawl • Integrates multiple vendor’s technology into pools of interoperable resources

HP Matrix Operating Environment – The HP Matrix Operating Environment is a common management platform that extends from infrastructure-to-application, across servers, storage and networks. It includes tools for provisioning and modifying complex infrastructures, lifecycle management, resource provisioning, high availability, performance and capacity assessment, and automated consolidation analysis. HP Insight Dynamics is the infrastructure management at the core of the HP BladeSystem Matrix. HP Insight Dynamics infrastructure orchestration capabilities let you provision infrastructure in minutes to automatically activate physical and virtual servers, storage, and networking from pools of shared resources.

HP Advantage: Allows quick provisioning of the infrastructure using a common management platform. Reduces complexity, reduces time to operation, increases commonality across solutions, and reduces cost.

HP FlexFabric – HP FlexFabric creates a common, wired-once, virtual I/O network between servers, switches, and storage. This innovative technology fully virtualizes network connections and capacity to deliver network as a service. FlexFabric includes products from HP ProCurve and the Virtual Connect product lines.

HP Advantage: Reduces complexity, reduces integration effort, reduces time to operation, significantly reduces networking equipment needs, increases bandwidth productivity, and reduces cost.

HP Virtual Resource Pools - HP Virtual Resource Pools creates a common modular infrastructure of virtualized compute, memory, storage & network resources. Resources are aggregated and shared across the data center between HP ProLiant (x86) servers, Integrity servers, and StorageWorks storage products. Businesses can use the same architecture to manage multiple workloads across servers, storage and networking.

HP Advantage: Reduces underutilized platforms, reduces server and storage sprawl, reduces server silos, frees up floor space, increases productivity, reduces complexity, and reduces cost.

HP Data Center Smart Grid – HP Data Center Smart Grid provides intelligent energy management across systems and facilities controlling and reducing energy usage in real-time. This technology improves efficiency under any workload, lowers costs, and extends the energy capacity of existing facilities. The Smart Grid is a set of monitoring tools and embedded sensors that enable resource monitoring and capacity planning. HP Thermal Logic includes embedded technology designed to reduce energy usage and associated costs. Sea of Sensors monitors energy consumption and automatically adjusts cooling resources, using up to 32 sensors to adjust fan speeds and powers only the slots that are in use.

HP Advantage: Reduces energy consumption, extends the energy capacity of existing data center facilities, and reduces cost.

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HP Servers - HP servers are ideal for IT organizations that consider building a shared services infrastructure to centralize IT and reduce operational costs. HP servers are a robust offering for multi-tier enterprise applications. The common infrastructure and common management supports both cost-effective ProLiant x86 blades for front-end application workloads as well as mission-critical Integrity HP-UX servers for back-end database processing for the highest availability, virtualization, and utility computing.

HP Integrity with HP-UX provides the first shared services environment for managing mission-critical enterprise applications in a converged infrastructure environment. Integrity servers can scale to handle intense enterprise workloads. Additionally, Integrity servers provide the highest levels of reliability and availability due to extensive hardware design and HP Serviceguard solutions.

• Mission-critical applications can be automated and provisioned in minutes. • HP integrates the High Availability and Virtual Server Operating Environments (OEs) into the HP-UX

Operating System, unlike the IBM AIX OS environment. Pre-integrating these OEs reduce time, risk, and cost by improving deployment time, reducing complexity, simplifying lifetime maintenance, and reducing operational costs.

All HP servers are engineered for balanced performance across the 2 major workloads – OLTP and BI, unlike the POWER platforms that are engineered and optimized for the OLTP workload alone.

HP Advantage: The commonality and interoperability of HP servers in the Converged Infrastructure reduces complexity and reduces the deployment, integration, and customization required to achieve a cost effective infrastructure. Furthermore, these characteristics allow the fast implementation and efficient management of a multi-tier solution: back-end database hosting mission-critical Integrity Superdome 2 servers and front-end application hosting Intel Xeon servers.

TCO Analysis An analysis of the Superdome 2, powered with Intel Itanium 9300 processors, versus both the Oracle-Sun SPARC M9000 and the IBM POWER 770 shows a clear 3 year TCO advantage for Superdome 2.

The most important cost categories are included in this analysis:

• Hardware cost • Server software (OS and Oracle database) • Hardware and software support and maintenance • Facilities (power, cooling, space) • Systems administration

The following TCO analyses used Alinean Ltd. and Ideas International Inc. data to generate the comparative values.

Superdome 2 with Intel Itanium processor 9300 vs. Oracle-Sun SPARC M9000 TCO analysis

• 3 Year TCO comparison • Superdome 2 has 32 cores vs. 64 cores in the Oracle-Sun M9000

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Table 1: Oracle-Sun M9000 vs. HP Integrity SD2-32 - Proposed Environment

Server OS DBMS Server number Sockets/Cores Total cores

Oracle-Sun M9000 SPARC64 VII (2.88 GHz)

Solaris Oracle 11g 1 16/64 64

HP-Integrity Superdome SD2-32 (1.86 GHz)

HP-UX 11i v3 Oracle 11g 1 8/32 32

Table 2: 3 Year TCO comparisons – Oracle-Sun M9000 vs. HP Integrity SD2-321

TCO Comparison – Cumulative 3 year

Solution A: Oracle SPARC 1 x M9000-32/64c

Solution B: HP Integrity 1 x SD2-32/32c

Difference (A-B) Amount

Difference (A-B) Percentage

Server Hardware $1,209,311 $277,045 $932,266 77.1%

Server Software $1,710,000 $1,220,808 $489,192 28.6%

Hardware and Software Support and Maintenance

$1,721,295 $875,791 $845,504 49.1%

Systems Administration $333,618 $278,505 $55,113 16.5%

Facilities (Power, Cooling & Floor Space)

$44,610 $19,146 $25,464 57.1%

Total IT Costs $5,018,834 $2,671,295 $2,347,539 46.8%

HP Advantage: Deploying a Superdome 2 yields overall savings of 47% over 3 years.

• Server software savings of 29% • Server hardware savings of 77% • Facilities savings of 57% • Support & maintenance cost savings of 49% • Payback in 7 months

Superdome 2 with Intel Itanium processor 9300 vs. IBM POWER 795

• 3 Year TCO comparison • Superdome 2 has 32 cores vs. 48 cores in the IBM POWER 795

1 Individual result may vary. Analysis assumes Oracle DB site-wide license

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Table 3: IBM POWER 795 vs. HP Integrity SD2-32 – Proposed Environment

Server OS DBMS Server number

Cores Total cores

IBM - Power 795 POWER7 4.0 GHz (6ch/48co)

IBM AIX/OS400 AIX 1 48 48

HP-Integrity Superdome SD2-32 (1.6 GHz) HP-UX 11i v3 Oracle 11g 1 32 32

Table 4: 3 Year TCO comparisons – IBM POWER 795 vs. HP Integrity SD2-322

TCO Comparison – Cumulative 3 year

Solution A: IBM - Power 795 1 x POWER7 4.0GHz (6ch/48co)

Solution B: HP Integrity 1 x SD2-32/32c

Difference (A-B) Amount

Difference (A-B) Percentage

Server Hardware $758,914 $263,120 $495,794 65.3%

Server Software $0 $145,954 ($145,954) 0.0%

Hardware and Software Support and Maintenance

$1,635,058 $921,368 $713,690 43.6%

Systems Administration $218,076 $168,648 $49,428 22.7%

Facilities (Power, Cooling & Floor Space)

$47,798 $18,382 $29,416 61.5%

Total IT Costs $2,659,846 $1,517,472 $1,142,374 42.9%

HP Advantage: Deploying a Superdome 2 yields overall savings of 43% over 3 years.

• Server hardware savings of 65% • Facilities savings of 62% • Support & maintenance cost savings of 44% • Payback in 4 months

2 Individual result may vary. Analysis assumes Oracle DB site-wide license

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HP Migration Resources HP Migration Process The HP migration process embodies a mature and flexible methodology that provides a consistent framework for capturing and carrying out customer requirements. The process is built on years of migration experience and best practices, across a variety of databases, applications, and platforms. The process is tool-agnostic, providing flexibility in solution development. HP has 20 years worth of experience migrating customers off of Oracle-Sun servers, IBM servers, databases, and applications to HP solutions.

Figure 3: HP migration process

HP-UX 11i on HP Integrity

Linux on HP ProLiant

Windows on HP ProLiant

MIGRATION PATH

THE HP MIGRATION CENTER

MIGRATION PROCESS

SupportExecutePlanAssess

HP SUNSET COMPLETE CARE INCENTIVES

The key benefits of the HP migration process are:

• A standard high level process which is: o based on decades of expertise and best practices o repeatable o customizable by database and application technology, platform, and migration toolset o scalable - accommodates simple to complex migrations

• Identifies migration requirements up front and properly addresses those requirements a strategy document.

• Incorporates production dress rehearsals to refine the deployment prior to the actual deployment phase.

• Includes data quality analysis to address source side data issues prior to migration.

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HP Migration Center and Services Over the past 20 years HP has helped migrate thousands of customers, gaining valuable knowledge, expertise, and repeatability. Migrations from older architectures allow customers to take advantage of HP infrastructure to reduce costs, improve performance, and gain competitive advantage. Through the HP Migration Center, HP combines best practices with new technologies such as the HP Converged Infrastructure to give you simple and unified low-risk solutions.

Modernizing from antiquated and siloed Oracle-Sun and IBM environments to a flexible and integrated Converged Infrastructure takes experience and planning. The HP Migration Competence Center, as well as HP’s data center transformation specialists, can guide your operations teams through the following decisions and options required to take advantage of the Converged Infrastructure capabilities.

• Reduce aggregate server and core count by eliminating lightly utilized, dedicated servers. Let HP evaluate your current workload inventory and help you plan a virtualized environment that improves utilization while cutting software instances and related licensing costs.

• Cut provisioning time from days to minutes. Distributed environments are known for complex cabling, parallel server and storage wiring, and slow, complex, error-prone, provisioning procedures. HP can help you accelerate repetitive provisioning tasks by taking advantage of application templates while relying on HP Virtual Connect to instantly provision servers and storage connections.

• Dedicated servers are usually underutilized outside of peak workload hours. Verify there is always “just enough” capacity by letting HP evaluate your current workloads and demand cycles, in order to help you define a much more efficient environment. Accurately address capacity needs without overspending using HP Capacity Planner technology, part of the HP CI management umbrella.

• HP can help you constrain power consumption to match active workloads. HP Data Center Smart Grid enables the automatic “dialing-back” of power consumption for lightly loaded resources.

The HP Migration Center maintains a close relationship with many database and application partners to ensure a smooth, complete migration solution with respect to the databases and applications. Additionally, the HP Migrations Center works closely with the HP Solution Centers and Competence Centers to assist with database and application migrations.

The Migration Center can deploy experts for Superdome 2 and HP-UX as well as HP specialists for the operating systems of other vendors. Additionally, HP maintains close development and support arrangements with major operating systems vendors: Microsoft® Windows®, Novell SUSE Linux, Oracle Enterprise Linux, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

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© Copyright 2010-2011 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

Intel, Intel Itanium and Intel Xeon are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group.

4AA3-1751ENW, Created November 2010; Updated May 2011, Rev. 3

For more information Superdome 2

http://www.hp.com/go/superdome2

Intel Itanium

http://www.intel.com/go/itanium

The Intel Itanium Processor 9300 Series: A Technical Overview for Decision Makers

http://download.intel.com/products/processor/itanium/323247.pdf

HP Converged Infrastructure

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/solutions/converged/main.html

HP Serviceguard Solutions for High Availability & Disaster Recovery

http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/w1/en/os/hpux11i-serviceguard-works.html

The HP Migration Center white paper

http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA1-0783ENW.pdf

Migrate to HP

Call to action

http://www.hp.com/go/migratetohp

See for yourself how HP Superdome 2 makes an ideal platform for your enterprise workloads. Ask for a TCO assessment or migration assessment to get started. For more information, please contact your HP representative or visit: www.hp.com/go/migratetohp