Monday, June 6, 2011

HP delivers applications appliance solutions that leverage converged infrastructure for virtualization, data management

LAS VEGAS -- As part of its new Converged Infrastructure offerings, HP today here at the DISCOVER 2011 event rolled out AppSystems Portfolio, which offers a fully integrated appliance-like technology stack that includes hardware, management software, applications, tailored consulting and HP Solution Support services.

The new HP AppSystems portfolio is designed to improve application performance and reduce implementation from months to a matter of minutes. New application deployments can be complex, taking up to 18 months to roll out and optimize for the business.

The complexity of maintaining and integrating these environments often results in missed deadlines, incomplete projects, increased costs and lost opportunities. In fact, only 32 percent of application deployments are rated as “successful” by organizations, in a recent HP survey. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of Briefings Direct podcasts.]

HP AppSystem solutions can be rapidly deployed, supports a choice of applications, and is built on open standards to seamlessly integrate within existing infrastructures. The portfolio includes the following:

The complexity of maintaining and integrating these environments often results in missed deadlines, incomplete projects, increased costs and lost opportunities.


  • The HP Business Data Warehouse Appliance, which reduces the complexities and costs faced by many midmarket users when deploying data warehouses. Optimized for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, the system can be implemented 66 percent faster than competing solutions for less than $13,000 per terabyte. Jointly engineered with Microsoft, the solution results in up to 50 percent faster input/output bandwidth to speed data load and query response.
  • The HP Database Consolidation Solution optimized for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, which simplifies the management of virtualized infrastructures associated with the proliferation of SQL server databases. Optimized for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, it consolidates hundreds of transactional databases into a single, virtual environment while enabling applications to access data.Once installed, new high-performance SQL Server databases can be provisioned in minutes and migrations can be accomplished with near-zero downtime.
  • The new HP VirtualSystem portfolio, also based on HP Converged Infrastructure, consists of turnkey server and client virtualization solutions. The offerings are built on the HP BladeSystem platform, HP Lefthand/3PAR storage and HP FlexFabric networking technologies. As a result, they support up to three times more virtual machines per server, three times the I/O bandwidth and twice the memory as competing offerings. Also, the HP VirtualSystem portfolio is heterogeneous, supporting existing IT investments, multiple hypervisor strategies and operating systems with a common architecture, management and security model.
These new solutions expand HP’s line of turnkey appliances, which also includes: HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance and HP Business Decision Warehouse Appliance.

HP Technology Services also provides a full life cycle of consulting services, from strategy, assessment, design, test, implementation, training and HP Solution Support.

Vertica Analytics: Exadata Killer?

A key component of the new Converged Infrastructure offerings is the HP Vertica Analytics System, a potential Exadata killer for real-time Big Data analytics. Traditional relational database management systems (RDBMS) and enterprise data warehouse (EDW) systems were designed for the business needs of nearly 20 years ago. Today, vast amounts of structured and unstructured data are being created everywhere, every instant and from a variety of sources.

Built on the HP Converged Infrastructure, the new HP Vertica Analytics System provides an appliance-like, integrated technology stack that includes hardware, management software applications, consulting and HP Solution Support services.

The scale out cluster architecture of the HP Vertica Analytics System utilizes columnar storage and massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture. This enables users to load data up to 1,000 times faster than traditional row-stored databases and supports hundreds of nodes as well as petabytes of data efficiently without performance degradation, said HP. Further, because the systems are able to query data directly in compressed form, clients can store more data, achieve faster results, and use less hardware.

Only 32 percent of application deployments are rated as “successful” by organizations.



The HP Vertica Analytics System provides:
  • A data-compression technology that delivers a 50 to 90 percent reduction in database storage requirements with 12 separate compression algorithms.
  • An integrated, next-generation analytics database engine that can be deployed in minutes.
  • An optimized physical database design for user query needs with the Database Designer tool.
  • Faster response that can generate results in seconds versus hours and in real time.
  • Ease of integration with existing business analytics applications, reporting tools and open source software frameworks that support data-intensive distributed applications, such as Apache Hadoop.
The HP Vertica Analytics System is available immediately, in quarter, half and full-rack configurations. The HP Vertica Analytics Platform (software) also may be deployed on existing x86 hardware with the ability to run the Linux operating system.

When HP acquired Vertica early in 2011, I wondered if this was their path to a Exadata killer. Exadata, you may recall, was a join warehouse appliance effort between Oracle and HP before Oracle bought Sun. The HP hardware part of the Exadata line kind of fizzled out as Sun hardware was then used.

But now, Vertica plus HP converged infrastructure is architected to leverage in-memory data analytics of, for and by Big Data in the petabytes range. Oracle has its OLTP strengths, but for real-time analytics at scale and affordable cost, HP is betting big on Vertica. It's a critical element at the heart of HP’s growth strategy. These announcements around ease of deployment and support should go a long way to helping users explore and adopt it.

HP Vertica Systems real time analytics platform already has more than 350 clients in a variety of industries including finance, communications, online web and gaming, healthcare, consumer marketing and retail, said HP.

"We're winning deals against Exadata," said Martin Whittaker, Vice President for Systems and Solutions Engineering, Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking (ESSN), HP Enterprise Business.

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