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Converged Infrastructure Systems Comparative Assessment: VCE vs. HP

Converged Infrastructure Systems Comparative Assessment:

VCE vs. HP

December 2015

T o p l i n e S t r a t e g y G r o u p




Contents

Introduction .........................................................................................................................................1

Converged Infrastructure 1.0 ............................................................................................................1

The Changing Face of IT Infrastructure ...........................................................................................3

New Storage Technologies ...........................................................................................................3

Expanding Infrastructure Stacks .................................................................................................4

SDN and Fabric Architectures ......................................................................................................4

Converged Infrastructure 2.0: CI for the New Data Center Paradigm .......................................4

Evaluating CI Vendors .........................................................................................................................5

About VCE .............................................................................................................................................7

VCE’s CI 1.0 Systems .......................................................................................................................7

VCE’s CI 2.0 Systems .......................................................................................................................7

Expanding Infrastructure Stacks .................................................................................................8

Intelligence Networking Fabrics and Management ................................................................8

About HP ...............................................................................................................................................8

HP’s CI 1.0 Systems .........................................................................................................................9

HP’s CI 2.0 Systems ...................................................................................................................... 10VCE vs. HP CI Summary.................................................................................................................... 10

Comparing HP and VCE on CI 1.0................................................................................................... 11

Engineering: Engineered as a System ..................................................................................... 12

Deployment: Physically and Logically Factory-Built as a System ...................................... 13

Maintenance and Upgrades:Ongoing System-wide Coordination of Patches and Upgrades ........................................ 13

Support: Single Cross-Trained Support as a System ............................................................ 14

Roadmap: Future-Proof System Roadmap ............................................................................. 15Comparing VCE and HP on CI 2.0................................................................................................... 15

Portfolio of CI Systems ............................................................................................................... 16

Extended Stack ............................................................................................................................ 17

Intelligent Networking Fabric and Management ................................................................. 18

Maintenance and Support across the Entire CI Deployment ............................................. 18

Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 19




Introduction The importance of IT has never been greater. Companies are transforming their business models with digital

technologies, leveraging emerging mobile and social platforms, and increasingly operating online. And all ofthese developments are powered by IT innovation.

Yet, IT departments face critical challenges inmeeting the ever-increasing demands of thebusiness. With new generations of ever moresophisticated hardware, complexity in the datacenter has soared, which in turn, has caused ITadministrative costs (Provision, patch and config;

New service request and approval; Vendor andinternal meeting; Monitor, troubleshoot and

remediate) to skyrocket. In fact, according to IDC,IT staff spent 79% of their time on operational andadministrative tasks and only 21% on innovation andnew projects.1

For IT managers facing skyrocketing administrative

costs on one side and demands from business leadersto accelerate innovation on the other, traditionalapproaches to designing, deploying, managing, andmaintaining infrastructure are not sustainable.

Converged Infrastructure 1.0In 2009, vendors introduced their first major attempt to address these administrative costs with referencearchitectures—off-the-shelf designs that serve as a starting point for a system. However, because reference

architectures only address the first step in the lifecycle of a system—the design stage—they provided onlyincremental advantages over business as usual.

It was not until 2010, when the first converged infrastructure (CI) systems were released, that ITorganizations had a solution that dramatically reduced their administrative overhead and freed substantialresources for innovation. A CI 1.0 system is a fully integrated, vendor-delivered system that combinescompute, SAN or NAS storage, and network and virtualization elements into a single pool of resources that isengineered, manufactured, and supported by the vendor as a unified system.

Table 1 summarizes the CI 1.0 evaluation criteria. It also details the differences between conventional, field-assembled, customized installations (do-it-yourself [DIY]) and factory-integrated CI 1.0 systems. As the tableillustrates, by providing a standardized, vendor-delivered system, CI providers take on many of the tasksinvolved in designing, deploying, and supporting systems across their lifecycle that have historically beenperformed by the IT department.

1 IDC Converged Systems Survey, August 2014

1

Figure 1:Allocation of IT Admin and Operations Staff Time




Table 1. CI 1.0 Evaluation Criteria: Field Assembled Customized Implementation (DIY) vs. CI 1.0 System

Area Field-Assembled Customized

Installation (DIY)

Factory-Integrated CI 1.0 System

Engineering Custom implementations consisting of

separate pools for compute, network,and storage are designed from scratch

by IT staff and vendor services.

The system is engineered by the vendor

as a single integrated pool for optimalperformance and availability.

Deployment Systems are delivered as components to

the data center, which is physically andlogically configured on site by vendor

services and/or IT staff.

Systems are manufactured and

logically configured at the factory usingstandardized processes.

Maintenance and Upgrades Patches for each component mustbe thoroughly tested by IT staff

against custom installations to ensurecompatibility.

Expanding capacity requirescareful testing of newer versions of

components by the IT department.

Patches are preselected, pretested,and prepackaged by the vendor for

interoperability and compatibility withinstalled configurations, and are ready for

immediate nondisruptive deployment.

The same holds true for the latest versions

of components that are used to expandthe system.

Support Vendors’ silo-based supportorganizations specialize in individual

components. This places the burdenon IT of overall problem resolution andof mediating finger-pointing among

vendors or among a vendor’s productdivisions.

A single point of ownership is expert inall aspects of the system. All deployed

system configurations are fully supportedto accelerate problem resolution.

Roadmap The process starts over from scratch

at the design phase, relying on IT orservice providers. Migration requirescustomized services.

A jointly integrated roadmap for the

whole technology stack providescustomers clear visibility into themigration path to next-generationtechnology.

Technology roadmaps for all componentsare in lockstep with component vendors,

enabling precisely coordinated releasemanagement.

When compared to traditional, custom installations, the agility, cost, and availability advantages of CI 1.0 areremarkable. An IDC white paper2 found that CI systems:

Reduce IT infrastructure and IT infrastructure staff costs by 36%.

Increase IT time spent on business enablement by 338%.

Shorten time to market for new services/products by 77%.

Cut downtime by 96%.

Given these results, it is no surprise that CI sales reached $8.1 billion in 2014 and were growing at a rate of23% per year.3

2

2 IDC White Paper. The Business Value of VCE Vblock Systems: Leveraging Convergence to Drive Business Agility , May 2015(http://www.vce.com/asset/documents/idc-business-value-whitepaper.pdf)

3 Gartner. Market Share Analysis: Data Center Hardware Integrated Systems, Worldwide, July 2015 (https://www.gartner.com/doc/2813520/market-share-analysis-data-center). The $8.1B includes all segments of the CI market.

https://www.gartner.com/doc/2813520/market-share-analysis-data-center

https://www.gartner.com/doc/2813520/market-share-analysis-data-center




The Changing Face of IT InfrastructureWhile conventional blade servers and SAN/NAS-based infrastructure4 connected via traditional networkrouting/switching architectures has long formed the backbone of IT infrastructure, this is now changing. The

change is being driven by two major trends.

The first trend is the emergence of new workloads, such as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and Big Data,that require new capabilities and place differing and unique demands on the infrastructure. For example,VDI requires systems that can deliver extremely high Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) while BigData necessitates massive scale-out storage deployments.

The second trend is the advent of cloud-native hyperscale systems like the ones run by Amazon, Facebook,

and Google. Rather than using traditional, monolithic application designs, these companies buildapplications using networks of microservices. With these application architectures, resiliency and scalabilityare built right into the software, enabling them to run on commodity hardware while still achieving highlevels of uptime. This combination of the application architectures and the commodity hardware can alsoprovide agility. Using cloud orchestration, software-defined infrastructure, and continuous delivery tools,companies can achieve a high degree of automation, which enables them to quickly scale, make changes,and deploy new releases.

Because of these trends, companies are increasingly complementing their traditional infrastructure withnew technologies. New types of storage, software-defined networking (SDN), fabric-based, spine-and-leafnetworking architectures, cloud management and orchestration, and other new technologies are becomingmainstream in the corporate data center.

New Storage Technologies

Beyond HDD-based SAN/NAS storage, three new storage technologies are getting more attention.

All-Flash Arrays: With I/O speeds an order of magnitude faster than HDDs, flash has been used for

several years in HDD systems in a limited fashion to improve performance. However, costs have nowfallen to the point where all-flash arrays are an increasingly popular choice for extremely high IOPSworkloads, such as OLTP and VDI.

Scale-Out NAS Storage: With the emergence of Big Data applications such as Hadoop, data storeshave reached scales not previously imagined. Scale-out NAS storage architectures enable companiesto granularly and cost-effectively grow capacity in a nondisruptive manner, while also boostingperformance and throughput.

Software-Defined Storage (SDS)/Hyperconverged Systems: SDS provides an alternative to stand-alone storage systems by using software to create a virtual block, file, or object storage pool from thedisks directly attached to commodity servers. Commercially available SDS solutions come in several

different form factors: y SDS software-only solutions that companies load onto their own hardware

y Hyperconverged appliances (appliances that bundle compute and SDS software)

y Hyperconverged rack systems (rack-scale systems of compute, network, and SDS software)

Software-only solutions and hyperconverged appliances that do not provide the same levelof scalability or type of reliability as systems using SAN/NAS storage have started to become

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4 Infrastructure comprised of compute; SAN or NAS storage based on spinning, Hard Disk Drives (HDDs);North/South and East/West networking; and virtualization.




successful for smaller, Tier 2 and nonproduction workloads. Meanwhile, the recently introduced rack-scale systems are beginning to bring SDS to larger, more critical workloads.

Expanding Infrastructure Stacks

Where infrastructure has been traditionally defined as compute, network, storage, and virtualization, thedefinition has been expanding to include additional components both up and down the stack. Up thestack, cloud orchestration to enable private and hybrid clouds has become an integral component of manyinfrastructures. Down the stack, due to the growth of Active-Active data center configurations, BusinessContinuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) capabilities are tied more deeply into the core infrastructure thanever before.

SDN and Fabric Architectures

While virtualization and cloud orchestration have been instrumental in enabling companies to agilelydeploy their compute and storage resources, spine-and-leaf networking fabrics and SDN bring the samelevel of flexibility and agility to the network by enabling software-driven, policy-based configuration.

Converged Infrastructure 2.0: CI for the New Data Center Paradigm The overall impact of these new technologies is a fundamental change in how data centers are designedand operated. In the emerging paradigm, rather than setting up individual, stand-alone systems, companiesdeploy an integrated fabric where orchestration services enable workloads to be seamlessly migrated to thesystem that most cost-effectively meets their performance, scalability, and reliability needs.

While there is no question that CI systems have been very successful in increasing agility and reducing

the costs of “keeping the lights on,” CI must expand beyond providing individual, stand-alone CI systems.It must also support the new data center paradigm by providing the CI experience across the entire datacenter—CI 2.0, or CI at data center scale. CI 2.0 has four criteria:

1. Portfolio of CI Systems: The vendor provides a portfolio with a wide range of individual CI systems—each delivered with the vendor’s best CI experience—that leverage a wide array of technologies tomeet the price, performance, and availability needs of the full range of an organization’s differentworkloads. This includes CI with different storage technologies, such as all-flash arrays, HDDs, and SDS,

as well as systems of different capacities.

2. Extended Stack: The vendor includes additional layers of the stack in their full CI experience. Thisincludes foundational services, such as BC/DR, as well as the cloud and orchestration services requiredto coordinate the infrastructure.

3. Intelligent Networking Fabric and Management: The vendor provides a networking fabric that

intelligently connects each individual system into the whole federation. The vendor also providesmanagement software that serves as a single point for maintaining the infrastructure across all of theCI systems.

4. Maintenance and Support across the Entire CI Deployment: At data center scale, the vendor supportsand maintains the infrastructure as one infrastructure, not as a collection of individual systems. Thevendor provides a fully coordinated patch release, where patches for all components of the infrastructureare tested together. This ensures that when patches are installed, every component continues tointeroperate with every other component. In addition, the vendor provides a single point of ownership

for resolving support issues across the entire infrastructure.

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Figure 2 illustrates the key differences between CI 1.0 and CI 2.0.

Figure 2. Key Differences between CI 1.0 and CI 2.0

Evaluating CI VendorsPerhaps the greatest challenge for companies selecting a CI vendor is to determine what the true experience

is like of designing, managing, maintaining, supporting, and expanding their infrastructure vs. what vendorsclaim. If one were to just read marketing materials, it would seem that practically all vendors’ CI systemsdeliver similar cost, agility, and availability advantages over field-assembled customized installations.

Furthermore, it would seem that many vendors have made significant strides toward delivering CI 2.0.However, this is not the case.

Between 2012 and 2015, Topline Strategy Group conducted three major studies of the CI market. In thesestudies, Topline Strategy Group surveyed over 800 and interviewed over 125 IT professionals responsible formanaging their companies’ data center infrastructure on their use of and experiences with CI systems. Themajority of the participants worked for organizations with >$1B in revenue and/or 1,000 employees. As partof these studies, Topline Strategy Group also reviewed industry analyst reports, vendor marketing materialsand white papers, and other publicly available content.

These studies found that:

There is tremendous range in the true lifecycle experience for CI 1.0 systems. While some

solutions come very close to the ideal described previously in Table 1, others provide only modestimprovements over field-assembled customized installations.

Many of the offerings that are marketed as CI do not provide the true CI experience. In somecases, in an effort to make their CI offerings seem as broad as possible, vendors have brandednew bundles as part of their CI portfolio that are not CI at all. Often, these bundles are reference

architectures—designs for systems that customers can build themselves or system integrators buildon customers’ behalf—not factory-integrated systems. In other cases, these bundles are simplyadditional software (for cloud orchestration, VDI, etc.) that is sold alongside the CI system, but arenot delivered or supported as an integral part of the CI experience.

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So how do companies effectively evaluate CI vendors? The following two questions provide the high levelbasis for doing so:

1. How well does the CI experience of the vendor’s core CI offering deliver on the promise of transforming

IT infrastructure? Does it provide a factory-integrated system that lowers the administrativeburden, thereby freeing up resources for innovation? (Refer to the vertical axis of Figure 3—Comprehensiveness of CI Experience.)

2. To what extent is the vendor delivering its CI experience across the entire data center? Can it delivera portfolio of CI systems that are guaranteed to interoperate, that are integrated via an intelligentfabric, and are managed, maintained, and supported as an infrastructure, not a few point products ora collection of reference architectures? (Refer to the horizontal axis of Figure 3—Breadth of CI for the

Integrated Data Center.)

Using the answers to these two questions, CI vendors can be segmented into one of four quadrants (Figure 3):

Thin CI (lower left): companies that despite marketing CI, have made only modest progress in delivering it

Thin CI Layer Applied Data Center Wide (lower right): companies that have made only modest progress

in developing a true CI solution but offer it across a broad portfolio CI 1.0: Deep CI, but Limited Options (upper left): companies that are delivering a strong CI experience

but only provide it on a limited set of systems

CI 2.0: Deep CI at Data Center Scale (upper right): companies that are truly delivering on both CI 1.0 and C2.0

Figure 3. CI Vendors Fall into One of Four Quadrants

The remainder of this white paper compares the CI offerings from two vendors, VCE and HP. The next twosections provide an overview of each vendor’s CI offerings. This is followed by a detailed comparison usingthe evaluation methodology outlined in the previous section.

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About VCEVCE is the leading provider of CI systems. It is an independent operating company within the EMCfederation, with a minority investment from Cisco. The company has 1,200 customers worldwide who have

deployed more than 3,000 systems. According to Gartner’s most recently published report, VCE currentlycontrols 48% of the CI market.5

VCE’s CI 1.0 Systems

Since launching its first system in 2010, VCE has been delivering CI 1.0 systems (compute, networking, HDD-

based SAN/NAS storage, and virtualization) using best-of-breed components and the latest technologiesfrom industry leaders EMC, Cisco, and VMware. The company currently offers four series of HDD-basedVblock Systems ranging from the Vblock 100 series, designed for small data centers, to the Vblock 700 series,capable of supporting the largest enterprises.

Also since launching its first system, VCE has been delivering systems that are engineered, manufactured,and supported by the vendor as a unified system throughout the lifecycle of the system. The key elements ofthe VCE experience include:

System Design Engineering: In addition to the thousands of Cisco, EMC, and VMware engineersworking on advancing the core subsystems, VCE maintains a dedicated team of engineers responsiblesolely for turning the components into highly optimized, fully integrated, vendor-delivered systems.

Factory-Integrated to a Precise Configuration: All Vblock Systems are built at one of the company’stwo global manufacturing sites where standardized processes and extensive quality checks ensure thatevery Vblock System conforms precisely to VCE’s designs.

Configuration Integrity across the Lifecycle: Once the system is delivered, VCE Vision IntelligentOperations software (VCE Vision™) ensures each system’s configuration integrity throughout its life. Itautomatically monitors the configuration of each Vblock System against VCE standards and provides

tools to close any gaps between the actual state and desired state. Maintenance and Upgrades: With every deployed Vblock System complying with approved VCE

configurations, VCE is able to manage its systems as unified products across their entire lifecycle.

When customers buy products, they expect patches and upgrades to be fully certified, to require littleor no testing by IT, and to be deployed with minimal risk. This is precisely the experience VCE providesits customers.

Support: VCE Support also delivers a unified product experience. With a single point of ownership forsupport across the entire system, VCE’s cross-trained support teams can quickly diagnose problemsand resolve issues without finger-pointing.

VCE’s CI 2.0 SystemsOver the last year, VCE has made substantial progress on delivering a true CI 2.0 offering. The keyachievements are summarized below.


VCE has expanded its CI portfolio to include the following storage options:

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5 Gartner. Market Share Analysis: Data Center Hardware Integrated Systems, Worldwide, July 2015Note: Gartner refers to General Purpose Converged Infrastructure as Converged Systems.




SDS: For Tier 2 workloads and for new application architectures where resiliency is designed into theapplication, VCE offers its hyperconverged rack system VxRack. VxRack is a highly scalable system thatdelivers the simplicity, agility, and cost advantages that come from SDS.

All-Flash Arrays: For IOP-intensive workloads, such as VDI and high performance databases, VCE offersthe Vblock 500 series outfitted with EMC’s XtremeIO all-flash array. The Vblock 540 can support millionsof IOPS with sub-millisecond response time that is maintained as the system is scaled.

Scale-Out Storage: To scale out the storage of a VCE CI deployment, VCE offers EMC’s Isilon NAS scale-out storage, which can scale all the way to 50 PB.


BC/DR: For BC/DR, VCE has extended its CI experience to incorporate EMC’s data protection solutionsincluding Avamar, Data Domain RecoverPoint, and VPlex, providing customers a range of price/protectionoptions from simply backing up data to real-time replication and failover across multiple sites. All ofthese solutions have been fully tested to interoperate with all of VCE’s CI systems. They are all includedin VCE’s Release Control Matrix (RCM), its matrix of which patch levels of components have been testedand certified to interoperate with each other. They are also supported via VCE’s infrastructure-wide

single point of support.

Cloud Management and Orchestration: To enable companies to easily move resources acrossthe infrastructure, VCE supports VMware’s vRealize and Cisco’s UCS Director. In addition, specificconfigurations of EMC Federation Elastic Hybrid Cloud (FEHC) are available as integration options onVblock Systems.

Intelligence Networking Fabrics and Management

To support the new data center paradigm of a fully integrated infrastructure rather than just a collection ofsystems, VCE has added the following elements to its CI portfolio:

SDN and Intelligent Fabric: VCE connects all of the components of its CI portfolio together with SDNand its Vscale spine-leaf fabric, enabling policy-driven resource pools to be optimally configured and

rapidly reconfigured across the infrastructure. VCE supports both of the leading SDN technologies aspart of its CI portfolio—Cisco’s ACI and VMware’s NSX.

Single Point of Management: VCE’s Vision 3.0 management software was written from the groundup for CI. It provides a single point for monitoring the status and health of all VCE components on thenetwork. Unlike conventional management software that treats each resource as a separate entity, VCEVision™ manages compute, network, storage, and virtualization resources as single, logical objects. Thisprovides a system view of performance that aligns with how resources are actually used rather than

simply providing a technology view.

About HPSince HP originally entered the market for CI systems in 2009, its offerings have reflected the fundamentaltension between selling individual components and converged systems. For that reason, HP’s CI strategy hasemphasized choice – customers have choice of purchasing systems with all new HP components or mixingand matching new HP components with components from other vendors and/or components the companyalready owns.

In HP’s ConvergedSystem portfolio, HP offers the following components:

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x86 Proliant servers

Storage products acquired from 3PAR

Networking products acquired and OEM’ed from 3Com, Emulex and others

The decision to make choice the center of its CI strategy has been driven by the fact that other than in

servers, HP is not among the market leaders. For example, in external storage, Garter places HP at havinga 9.5% share worldwide and a 6.3% share in North America, far below EMC’s 33.4% and 43.2% sharesrespectively.6 In networking, HP’s share lags behind that of market leader Cisco by a similarly wide margin.Because customers often require non-HP products for one or more components, to preserve the sale of atleast some of its components, HP has been willing to substitute out its own components for those from

other vendors.

While choice is often seen as a benefit, when it comes to CI, it has a major downside. Engineeringcomponents into a CI system that is delivered and supported as a product takes a lot of investment. Thebroader the set of component options that a vendor supports, the less the vendor can invest in productizingany specific solution.

It is for that reason that HP has focused on delivering just certain elements of the CI experience, suchas providing factory assembly and single point of support, that it can provide across a wide variety ofconfigurations. In other areas of the CI experience, especially the ones such as coordinating patch releases andupgrades that require extensive configuration-specific engineering investment, it has made little progress.

HP’s CI 1.0 Systems

Currently, HP offers one CI 1.0 model, its ConvergedSystem 700, consisting of Proliant blades, HP FlexFabric(OEM’d from Emulex), and 3PAR StoreServe. It is designed for implementations of 300 to 1,000 VMs. Thissystem has some, but not all, of the features of the CI ideal outlined previously in Table 1. For example:

The system is engineered by HP as a single integrated pool.

With HP’s Factory Express option, the system can be delivered fully assembled, although it still must belogically configured on site.

The company offers a single point of support and works to avoid finger-pointing among supportorganizations, but still operates support in component-based siloes.

HP does not offer coordinated patches that have been fully tested across all components.

To serve customers for whom the off-the-shelf ConvergedSystem 700 does not work, HP:

Enables customers to customize their ConvergedSystem 700, either by reusing existing components orsubstituting third party components.

Offers the ConvergedSystem 700x reference architecture for installations with more than 1,000 VMs.

Provides a range of other reference architectures, such as its joint reference architecture with Arista Networks.

When customers choose these options, they lose some of the CI benefits of HP’s off-the-shelf CI solutions.In fact, according to Topline Strategy’s November 2015 CI Market Study, 50% of HP CI customers chooseto customize their HP ConvergedSystem rather than purchase an off-the-shelf configuration.7 The mostcommon customizations include:

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6 Gartner. Market Share Analysis – External Storage Systems, All Regions 2Q15 Update

7 Topline Strategy Group. Converged Infrastructure Market Study Q4 2014




Substituting in Cisco or Brocade Top-of-Rack switches

Substituting in Cisco or Brocade storage networking

Substituting in EMC or other storage

Reusing existing components

Furthermore, our research found that in many of the cases where customers did opt for a standard HPConvergedSystem configuration, it was for a certified system dedicated to a specific use case such as SAPHANA, where due to certification, altering the configuration was not practical. As a result, the number ofHP ConvergedSystems being used for general purpose computing that were “deployed as engineered” is

relatively small.

HP’s CI 2.0 Systems


For CI 2.0, HP’s main development has been to introduce systems with new storage technologies.

All-Flash Array: The ConvergedSystem 700 described above has an off-the-shelf option where the

3PAR 7000 series storage can be outfitted with all solid state drives.

SDS: HP offers two off-the-shelf options for systems outfitted with SDS—the ConvergedSystem 200and 300. Both models consist of Proliant blades and use HP’s StoreVirtual VSA software to create avirtual SAN from the direct attached storage. While the ConvergedSystem 300 comes equipped withan HP 2920 switch, the ConvergedSystem 200 is a hyperconverged appliance, an appliance with just

compute and virtual storage that companies connect to their existing network. Both of these devicesare designed for implementations of 30 to 300 VMs.


When it comes to extending the stack, HP does not incorporate additional technologies into its core systemsas a packaged CI solution.

In the area of cloud management and orchestration, HP offers its ConvergedSystem 700x for Cloud, areference architecture for deploying its HP Helion CloudSystem Foundation/Enterprise software on aConvergedSystem 700x system, which is itself a reference architecture.

For data protection, HP provides a reference architecture for deploying HP DataProtector and HP StoreOncewith its ConvergedSystem 700x.

Intelligent Networking and Fabric Management

In this area, HP has made some significant strides. The company provides spine-and-leaf networking viaits 7900 and 5900 series switches and offers its OneView web-based management software. OneView isa platform first introduced in 2013 that has made progress toward delivering a single pane of glass for

managing, provisioning, and maintaining compute, network, and storage resources.

VCE vs. HP CI SummaryA previous section of this white paper proposed two questions that could be used to place CI vendors in oneof four quadrants (Figure 3): Thin CI, Thin CI Layer Applied Data Center Wide, CI 1.0, and CI 2.0.

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1. How well does the CI experience of the vendor’s core CI offering deliver on the promise of transformingIT infrastructure? Does it provide a factory-integrated system that lowers the administrative burden,thereby freeing up resources for innovation. (Refer to the vertical axis of Figure 3—Comprehensivenessof CI Experience.)

2. To what extent is the vendor delivering its CI experience across the entire data center? Can it delivera portfolio of CI systems that are guaranteed to interoperate, that are integrated via an intelligentfabric, and are managed, maintained, and supported as an infrastructure, not a collection of individualsystems? (Refer to the horizontal axis of Figure 3—Breadth of CI for the Integrated Data Center.)

As illustrated in Figure 4, answering these questions for VCE and HP leads to the conclusion that while VCEis in the upper right quadrant, delivering CI 2.0, HP is in the lower left quadrant, offering Thin CI. HP has only

partially delivered on CI 1.0 and only for a limited set of systems. Many of its offerings that are branded CI areactually reference architectures or bundles that do not carry even their limited CI lifecycle experience.

Figure 4. VCE vs. HP CI Evaluation

The next two sections present a detailed analysis of why VCE and HP have been placed in their respectivequadrants by evaluating them on the criteria for CI 1.0 and 2.0 presented in Table 3 and Table 4.

Comparing HP and VCE on CI 1.0 This analysis describes in detail how far each vendor has progressed toward delivering on the CI 1.0vendor-delivered system paradigm described previously in Table 1. For each criterion, each vendor wasrated on the degree to which each performs as a vendor-delivered standardized system vs. as a customized,

field-integrated installation on a 1 to 5 scale. Table 2 summarizes the results of that evaluation.

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Table 2. Evaluation Criteria of VCE CI 1.0 Systems and HP CI 1.0 Systems

Lifecycle Stage VCE Systems HP ConvergedSystems

Engineering: Engineered as a system 5 3

Deployment: Physically and logically factory-built as a system 5 3

Maintenance and Upgrades: Ongoing system-wide coordination

of patches and upgrades4 1

Support: Single cross-trained support as a system 5 3

Roadmap: Future-proof system roadmap 5 1

Average 4.8 2.2

Engineering: Engineered as a System

Evaluation Criterion: The system is engineered by the vendor as a single integrated pool for optimal

performance and availability.

Since its inception, VCE has been dedicated to engineering vendor-delivered systems for optimalperformance and availability. The company’s vision of creating optimized vendor-delivered systems isevidenced in 1) its selection of best-of-breed, market-leading components from EMC, Cisco, and VMware;and 2) the effort that goes into designing every detail of every one of its systems to achieve optimal results.

For example, the physical assembly documentation includes precise instructions for cable routing andrack design based on VCE’s heat dissipation and airflow analysis. The result is a system that is optimized forfloor space and HVAC requirements. Similarly, the logical configuration instructions ensure that the arrayfront-end ports and the X-Blade ports are distributed properly across the Fibre Channel (FC) and Ethernetswitching components.

In comparison, instead of aiming to deliver highly optimized systems, HP appears to have minimized the R&D

investment in engineering full systems because many of its customers end up customizing their systems.Technology Components

Compute: While HP’s CI offerings are based on its aging BladeSystem platform, VCE uses Cisco’s innovativeUCS platform. While HP is still the leading provider of x86 blade servers worldwide, Cisco has overtaken it inthe US. Cisco entered the x86 blade server market in 2009 and as of Q4 2014, they held a 29% share of theglobal market and 43% of the US market. Over the same period, HP’s share of the global market has fallenfrom 50% to 40%.9 In the US, its market share has fallen to 36%. This rapid shift in market share is largely dueto Cisco’s technology advantages over HP.

Storage: Whereas HP offers its own 3PAR storage, VCE’s systems are built using storage from EMC. EMC haslong been the storage market leader and has steadily been increasing its lead. In Q1 2015, EMC’s share of the

external storage market was 27.3%, while HP’s was 9.9%.10 The fortunes of EMC’s and HP’s storage productsstem directly from the breadth of each vendor’s product line and strength of its technology.

Networking: HP ConvergedSystems offers the option of the HP 5900 or Cisco Nexus switch for top-of-racknetworking and its VirtualConnect FlexFabric for storage area networking. On the other hand, VCE usesCisco’s unified fabric based on its industry-leading Nexus and MDS product lines.

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9 Gartner. Market Share Analysis – Servers, All Regions 2Q15 Update

10 Gartner. Market Share Analysis – External Storage Systems, All Regions 2Q15 Update



Converged Infrastructure Systems Comparative Assessment: VCE vs. HP 13

Questions for Evaluating Engineering

1. Does the vendor build its CI system using industry-leading, best-of-breed components?

2. Has the vendor truly engineered systems that are optimized for performance and availability?

Deployment: Physically and Logically Factory-Built as a System

Evaluation Criterion: Systems are manufactured and logically configured at the factory using standardized processes

Speed of deployment is a key outcome of VCE’s focus on design-level standardization and integration. Inmost cases, VCE Vblock Systems are capable of shouldering operational loads within 45 days from the timeof customer order and within 48 hours of delivery. Both physical and logical builds are completed at thefactory, so when a Vblock System reaches its destination:

All components are assembled and fully tested.

The system is logically configured using a repeatable process with extensive automation.

VMware and naming conventions are installed, and IP addresses and VLANs are defined.

The net result is that VCE Vblock Systems arrive quickly and can be put into service quickly with lowadministrative effort for IT staff and minimal vendor services.

HP’s deployment is consistent with the company’s approach of delivering some but not all of the benefitsof CI. Even in the best case, only a portion of the system build takes place at the factory. When customersopt for HP’s Factory Express, its service for pre-assembling systems, the system is physically assembledat the factory. However, these systems still require logical configuration in the field by IT staff or vendorprofessional services teams.

When systems are customized with third party components or when they incorporate existingcomponents—which Topline Strategy Group’s research found happened 50% of the time11—some or all ofthe physical assembly and integration also occurred on site.

Questions for Evaluating Deployment 1. Does the system require physical or logical configuration on site? How much internal labor or

professional services will be required to deploy it?

2. Does the vendor provide a guaranteed deployment window for the system?

3. How much has deployment risk been reduced by the vendor?

4. How closely will the deployed system adhere to the vendor’s standard design specs? Will it be afactory-built system that achieves the high levels of performance and availability per the CI system’sengineering designs?

Maintenance and Upgrades: Ongoing System-wide Coordination of Patches and Upgrades

Evaluation Criterion: Patches are preselected, pretested, and prepackaged by the vendor for interoperability and

compatibility with installed configurations, and are ready for immediate nondisruptive deployment. The same

holds true for the latest versions of components that are used to expand the system.

With a constant stream of updates for each component, patching can be an administrative nightmare. Notevery patch is relevant to every deployed configuration, and each patch introduces interoperability andcompatibility risks in its own way.

11 Topline Strategy Group. Converged Infrastructure Market Study November 2015




VCE simplifies the process and mitigates the risk as follows:

1. Because VCE ships Vblock Systems only in standard configurations, the company supports the entireconfiguration for every system it ships. As a result, VCE is able to evaluate each patch to determine

which ones actually need to be installed on which systems.

2. VCE then tests each patch that does need to be installed against the entire Vblock System, certifyingcompatibility at the system level.

3. Finally, VCE bundles the patches into a single release. Through this process, VCE delivers risk-freepatch bundles with predictable outcomes on a regular basis, eliminating the need for customers toselect and test each patch—which may be released at unpredictable times—against their specific

configuration.

In comparison, as described above, HP has made very little progress in testing and certifying patches.Rather than offering a synchronized patch update across all its components, HP’s patching is completedcomponent by component.

The same differences between VCE and HP that exist in maintenance are also true for upgrades. Because

component vendors release new versions of their products every few months, it is virtually guaranteed thatwhen customers seek to expand the capacity of their systems, they will be installing newer componentversions. VCE handles the integration of new hardware component versions in a way similar to how ithandles patches—each new component release is tested against each shipped system configuration toensure system-level compatibility. In addition, the company also tests the design integrity of the completesystem, ensuring that it has the headroom for and can support the power and cooling needs of the newcomponent. As with patches, by the time new components reach the customer, they are ready to install withminimal disruption.

Similar to patching, HP does not provide system-wide testing of components against actual deployedconfigurations. This leaves the burden of testing each upgrade to the customer, as well as the risk carried by

each release.Questions for Evaluating Maintenance and Upgrades

1. Does the vendor issue system releases of patches that are preselected, fully tested, and validatedagainst the entire system, or do they issue component-by-component patches that need to bevalidated on your own custom installation?

2. Does the vendor preselect, fully test, and validate upgraded components against your deployedconfigurations beforehand at its own facilities, or do these components need to be tried out in yoursystems by your own IT resources, or by your vendor at your time and cost?

3. Given the vendor’s CI approach, how field-customized does the CI configuration become? As a result,how much of the interoperability and upgrade testing performed by the vendor can be leveraged?

How much additional resource does it take to maintain the system due to the customizations?

Support: Single Cross-Trained Support as a System

Evaluation Criterion: A single point of ownership is expert in all aspects of the system. All deployed system

configurations are fully supported to accelerate problem resolution.

VCE Support features a single point of contact for service request management and responsibility, includingescalation support tied directly into Cisco, EMC, and VMware engineering support. VCE’s cross-trained

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support staff handle compute, network, storage, and virtualization, and in 2014 they were able to resolve93% of calls without escalation to more specialized support.12

VCE’s emphasis on standardization also means that problem solving is shared across its customer base —

solutions are engineered in labs dedicated to problem re-creation and then distributed through the supportnetwork as needed.

In this area, HP has taken steps to provide customers a more seamless support model. For customerswho have all HP equipment, they have a single point of contact that coordinates support among variousorganizations. While this model has significantly reduced the finger-pointing among HP’s own supportorganizations, there still multiple touch points and limited shared problem-solving resolutions.

HP’s model also offers limited value to the 50% of HP CI customers who have substituted one or morethird party components.13 For those customers, the burden of isolating the problem and proving whichcomponent is causing the issue falls on IT staff, just like it does for custom installation.

Questions for Evaluating Support

1. Is there a true single point of ownership for support, or just a single point of contact that serves as a

front end to traditional siloed support?2. What happens to support if you customize your system with third party components?

Roadmap: Future-Proof System Roadmap

Evaluation Criterion: A jointly integrated roadmap for the whole technology stack provides customers clear

visibility into the migration path to next-generation technology. Technology roadmaps for all components are in

lockstep with component vendors, enabling precisely coordinated release management.

VCE has a proven record of releasing new versions of its systems that include the latest advances from eachcomponent vendor. The first Vblock System was released in 2010, and the company is currently shipping itsfifth-generation systems. The company maintains close roadmap coordination with Cisco, EMC, and VMware

to provide customers with visibility into new capabilities as they are being developed and with a clearmigration path for implementing new technologies.

Since 2011, HP has twice revamped its CI product line, each time discontinuing its old models andintroducing new ones without offering a migration path. As a result, it is difficult to judge whether HP hasany plans to support migration from its current generation of ConvergedSystems to the next.

Questions for Evaluating Roadmaps

1. Does the vendor have a proven record of introducing new generations of its solutions?

2. If it does, does it offer a migration path for its installed customers?

Comparing VCE and HP on CI 2.0Both VCE and HP have followed the same strategies for CI 2.0 as they did for CI 1.0. While VCE has sought todevelop a CI that conforms very closely to the CI ideal, HP has focused on supporting certain elements ofconvergence while doing very little in others.

The result is that VCE has developed a CI portfolio designed for the new data center paradigm. By

comparison, HP offers just a handful of different CI systems and has done very little to tie these systemsinto a larger framework. Table 3 provides side-by-side ratings on a 1 to 5 scale of VCE’s and HP’s CI offeringsagainst the four criteria for CI 2.0.

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12 Per VCE’s internal reports.

13 Topline Strategy Group. Converged Infrastructure Market Study November 2015




Table 3. Evaluation Criteria for VCE and HP CI 2.0 Portfolios


Portfolio of CI systems 5 2

Extended stack 4 2

Intelligent networking fabric and management 3 3

Maintenance and support across the entire CI deployment 5 1

Average 4.1 2.0

Portfolio of CI Systems

Evaluation Criterion: The vendor provides a portfolio with a wide range of individual CI systems—each delivered

with the vendor’s best CI experience—that leverage a wide array of technologies to meet the price, performance,

and availability needs of the full range of an organization’s different workloads.

Since 2010, when VCE introduced its first converged system, it has steadily expanded its portfolio with new

models, technologies, and options to support an ever-increasing set of customer needs. All VCE Systemsdeliver the same, complete CI experience. These include:

Four series of CI 1.0 systems: These range from the 100 series for smaller data centers, remote officelocations, and departmental applications to the Vblock 700 series designed to meet the needs ofthe largest enterprises. Whereas the 100 series uses EMC’s more affordable VNXe storage and rack-mounted servers and can be configured with three, six, or eight server nodes, the Vblock 700 usesEMC’s enterprise-class storage, Cisco UCS blade servers, and can scale up to 512 server nodes and 4 PB

of storage. Fitting between the 100 and 700, VCE also offers the 200 and 300 series.

The Vblock 540 with all-flash storage: The Vblock 540 comes equipped with Cisco UCS servers andEMC’s XtremeIO all-flash array.

The hyperconverged VxRack: VxRack is a rack-scale hyperconverged system built using EMC’s ScaleIOSDS software. VxRack deployments start with a single rack and can scale to 1,000 nodes with tens of PBof storage.

To further extend the storage of any of these systems, VCE also offers scale-out storage using EMC’s Isilonstorage, which provides scale-out NAS storage up to 50 PB.

By comparison, HP offers a limited portfolio of systems. It has a single CI 1.0 option—its ConvergedSystem700—which is designed for 300 to 1,000 VMs. HP provides no options for systems using SAN/NAS storage withfewer than 300 VMs. Above 1,000 VMs, the only option is the ConvergedSystem 700x, a reference architecture.

HP does offer two options for SDS—the ConvergedSystem 200 and 300. Both of these systems use HP

StoreVirtual SDS software. The 300 includes networking, whereas the 200 is a hyperconverged appliance,providing just compute and storage. HP does not offer scale-out storage as part of its CI portfolio.

Table 4 summarizes the VCE and HP CI portfolio of systems.

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Table 4. VCE and HP CI Portfolio of Systems


C I S Y S T E M S W I T H H D D S T O R A G E

Small CI Not Available

Midrange CI Partial CI

Large scale CI Reference Architecture

C I S Y S T E M S W I T H A L T E R N AT I V E S T O R A G E T E C H N O L O G I E S

All-flash Arrays CI Partial CI

Scale-out Storage CI Not Available

SDS CI Partial CI

Questions for Evaluating the Portfolio of CI Systems

1. How broad is the vendor’s portfolio of CI systems? Is it designed to meet a wide range of price,

performance, and availability needs?2. How many of the systems that it is marketing as CI are actually reference architectures or fully

custom systems?

3. Can the storage and compute of these systems be scaled out while still maintaining the full CI experience?

Extended Stack

Evaluation Criterion: The vendor includes additional layers of the stack in their full CI experience.

IT infrastructure includes more than just compute, network, storage, and virtualization. Additional software

layers and peripheral hardware are required to deliver a complete solution.

Just as VCE has been expanding its range of systems and technologies, it has also expanded the footprint forwhich it offers the CI product experience to include BC/DR and cloud management and orchestration.

For cloud management and orchestration, VCE offers VMware vRealize and Cisco UCS Director as options onits Vblock 300 and Vblock 700 series systems. When either of these options are selected, they are preloadedand configured on the Vblock System in the factory, included in the system-wide coordinated patch release,

and supported as part of the system. In addition to providing private cloud orchestration, adding either ofthese two software packages to a Vblock System enables companies to take advantage of the EMC FEHC.

For BC/DR, VCE has integrated EMC’s data protection portfolio, including Data Domain, Avamar,RecoverPoint, and VPlex.

While HP will sell additional software, such as its Helion CloudSystem Foundation, as part of a CI package

and may go as far as preloading software, it does not support them throughout the lifecycle. Additionalsoftware is logically configured in the field, is patched and maintained separately from the rest of thesystem, and is supported by a siloed support organization.

Table 5 summarizes the VCE and HP options for extending the stack.

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Table 5. VCE and HP Options for Extending the Stack


Cloud orchestration Full CI Stand-alone

BC/DR Full CI Stand-alone

Questions for Evaluating the Extended Stack

1. Are software packages that are marketed as part of a CI offering actually fully integrated componentsof the CI system, or are they simply stand-alone offerings that are sold alongside the CI system?

Intelligent Networking Fabric and Management

Evaluation Criterion: The vendor provides a networking fabric that intelligently connects each individual system

into the whole federation. The vendor also provides management software that serves as a single point for

maintaining the infrastructure across all of the CI systems.

Like it has for the rest of its CI infrastructure, VCE has brought lifecycle management to its Vscale fabric.When customers opt to deploy Vscale, they are choosing a fabric that has been engineered for optimalperformance, where upgrades to firmware and SDN software are tested at both the spine and leaf, including

the SDN software, for interoperability and are supported via a single point of support ownership. VCE thensupports the integrity of the entire deployment through its VCE Vision™ software, which helps coordinatethe optimal use of resources and the compliance of the entire infrastructure to CI standards.

Although an HP CI customer can deploy a spine-and-leaf architecture and/or SDN, it is deploying it as a DIY,field-delivered custom installation and does not enjoy the benefits that come from a true CI system. WhileHP’s OneView is an elegant tool that provides a single point of management for the deployment, it still treatsthe deployment as a collection of components, not an integrated infrastructure.

Questions for Evaluating Integrated Infrastructure

1. Is the fabric integrated into the CI offering or is it a DIY deployment?

2. Is the management system designed to support the unique needs of CI?

Maintenance and Support across the Entire CI Deployment

Evaluation Criterion: At data center scale, the vendor supports and maintains the infrastructure as one

infrastructure, not as a collection of individual systems.

Ultimately, in a CI 2.0 deployment, every system and component of the infrastructure has been testedto interoperate with every other system and component throughout its lifecycle. Patch releases arecoordinated across the infrastructure to ensure nondisruptive upgrades, and there is a single point of

support that takes ownership for solving problems across the infrastructure. VCE provides its customers withthis true CI 2.0 experience.

Providing maintenance and support at the individual system level is a prerequisite for providingmaintenance and support at data center scale. As described throughout this white paper, even in the bestcase, HP has only made modest progress toward maintenance and support at the individual system leveland has not begun to provide maintenance and support at data center scale.

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Questions for Maintenance and Support across the Entire CI Deployment

1. Does the vendor coordinate and pretest patches for its individual systems, and if it does, does itcoordinate across systems?

2. Does the vendor offer a single point of ownership for support for individual systems or just a frontend for siloed support? If it does, does that single point of ownership provide support across systemsand products?

Conclusion The first generation of CI systems—CI 1.0—have proven incredibly valuable in increasing agility, reducingthe time and money spent on deploying and administering infrastructure systems, and freeing resourcesfor innovation. Yet, to continue to add value as data centers evolve from a collection of stand-alone systemsbased on SAN/NAS storage to dynamic, integrated infrastructures that combine a range of technologies, CImust evolve as well.

On the surface, it may appear that HP is well on its way to accomplishing this and is delivering CI at data

center scale. However, the company is in fact delivering a thin layer of convergence. By contrast, VCE hastruly taken CI to the next level, and now has a significant leadership position in the CI 2.0 market. It has builta portfolio of systems that simplify purchasing and setup, shorten the time it takes to bring new capabilitiesonline, and reduce cost and complexity throughout the lifecycle of the product. It has then woven thesesystems together to deliver a true integrated deployment for the new data center paradigm. In short, VCE isin the business of supporting whole infrastructures that are much more than just the sum of their parts.

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