Storage Virtualization

This report defines storage-centric virtualized infrastructure, its opportunity and use cases, and the emerging vendor landscape that IT infrastructure and operations groups should evaluate as they purse the software-defined data center.

HP Cloud Solution for Microsoft is designed to provide a scalable, high-performance integrated infrastructure optimized for virtual environments built on Microsoft Hyper-V. Designed and built according to the Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track reference architecture, HP Virtual System for Microsoft comes standard with Microsoft Windows Server 2012 (which includes Hyper-V) and is designed to deliver top performance for a wide range of virtualized applications, including Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, and SharePoint. This paper will focus on ESG’s analysis of the costs and benefits—and ultimate economic value—associated with deploying and managing HP Cloud Solution for Microsoft, versus a comparable conventional data center infrastructure comprised of discreet, non-integrated compute, storage, network, and management components.

This paper examines how seven enterprise and midsize companies spanning the equipment rental, healthcare, retail, research, and telecommunications (service provider) industries were able to reduce their annual IT cost to deliver compute services by 58% by migrating to a blade platform.

It is very clear that datacenter managers need, in addition to server virtualization, the virtualization, pooling, and management of all the other resources that interoperate with their VMs. They require virtualized network interconnects and storage. They also need the tools to manage and automate these converged IT assets as an integrated datacenter system. This more agile system is the key to enabling the shift to a cloud-based infrastructure IT delivery model. Solution providers like HP are now addressing the need for more optimized and agile IT solutions. They are delivering virtualized storage, virtual application network (VAN) infrastructure, and the orchestration software to manage and automate all these ingredients as a single system. Read this whitepaper to learn more.

This document aligns the server hypervisor with the storage hypervisor by prescribing the best practices for deploying VMware® vSphere® 5 on clustered Data ONTAP.

This report applies to Microsoft® Exchange Server, SQL Server®, and SharePoint® Server mixed workload on VMware®vSphere™ 4, NetApp®unified storage (FC, iSCSI, and NFS), and Cisco Nexus®unified fabric.

This document describes a solution on a NetApp® shared storage infrastructure that provides system administrators with the ability to quickly copy, clone, and manage SAP® systems.

This solution guide provides guidelines and best practices for architecting, deploying, and managingVMware View virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions on NetApp storage systems.

Virtualization and cloud architectures can actually make it harder to deliver consistent performance to critical applications. Best practice performance management can help IT virtualize applications that require guaranteed performance.

As it has been the trend over the last decade, organizations must continue to deal with growing data storage requirements with the same or less resources. The growing adoption of storage-as-a-service, business intelligence, and big data results in ever more Service Level Agreements that are difficult to fulfill without IT administrators spending ever longer hours in the data center. Many organizations now expect their capital expense growth for storage to be unstoppable, and see operating expense levers - such as purchasing storage systems that are easy to manage - as the only way to control data storage-related costs.

This IDC paper “Business Value of Blade Infrastructures” indicates the considerable cost savings and the improved agility of the IT infrastructure by migrating to an HP BladeSystem environment. In fact, HP BladeSystem cut data costs by 68%. Customers participating in this study were able to pay back their initial investment in just over 7 months, a significant factor given the financial constraints most IT organizations are facing.

Uncover the impact modern business demands are having on corporate networks today and learn what you must do to ensure your network performs the way you need it to for business success.

The pace of innovation in the virtual world continues to accelerate, opening new virtual dimensions and strategies for multi-tier hypervisors.

Cloud services create a compelling case to move application processing and storage out of the data center and onto the network.

Flash Storage For Dummies explores the many uses and benefits of flash storage technology in the enterprise. From server cache and back-end storage cache to hybrid and all flash arrays, flash technology improves performance and increases reliability in storage infrastructures. It also reduces energy and real-estate costs in the data center.

Organizations have achieved significant benefit from virtualizing servers and storage environments, and now face the daunting task of deploying new network architectures to keep pace. Riverbed Technology and VMware have joined forces to help address these problems and make it easy to deploy and manage VXLAN overlay networks in highly virtualized data centers. Register to read the full report from The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).

Minimizing application and service disruptions while maximizing end-user experiences are paramount goals for any organization. Businesses of all sizes are challenged with ensuring their applications perform, yet, performance management solutions that understand the full performance picture, (applications, networks, virtualization, cloud, etc.) traditionally have been focused on the needs of very large enterprises.

A complete and holistic solution can help organizations create system snapshots that can be restored quickly and efficiently, getting users back up and productive immediately.

This document provides a summary of how IBM® Tivoli® Storage Productivity Center supports the IBM System Storage®SAN Volume Controller.

Taking a more comprehensive, unified approach to managing data—recovering any data from a single console—can not only reduce your capital and operating costs, but can also provide enhanced application availability for improved IT service levels.

Download this paper to learn best practices for Blade environments from Jed Scaramella, research manager of IDC's Services program on behalf of HP's customers.

Featuring Virtualization Best Practices for Reducing Costs

Read this whitepaper to learn how you can build a BladeSystem that fits your organization.

Blade servers can yield significant cost efficiencies over rack servers — while taking up a smaller footprint, consuming less power and providing significant advantages in terms of manageability, scalability and flexibility.

Savvy IT professionals are finding that blade servers are less expensive than traditional rack servers for most new deployments, while also delivering improvements in agility, scalability and manageability.