Converged vs. Composable – transition from C7000

[Zerrin_Waller]

Our longstanding HPE C7000 BladeSystem is now being discontinued after 14 years of innovation and service. If you’re a current Blade customer, parts will continue to be available as long as we have them available, and via channels such as HPE Renew, but it’s time to consider your transition plan.

In 2016, HPE launched an exciting new product called HPE Synergy - a composable, modular solution designed to scale compute, storage and fabrics independently to host virtual, containerized and bare metal applications. Four years on, our platform is a strong lead in our compute portfolio, and offers a step up from our traditional converged infrastructure that we demonstrated with HPE C7000 BladeSystem.

So what does composable infrastructure give you that converged infrastructure didn’t?

1. Single platform for virtualized, containerized and bare metal workloads

HPE Synergy is a platform that can be implemented for your current applications, but be future ready, to give you that standardized solution (something our customer Computacenter loved – see case study here). Unlike HyperConverged solutions, you can run bare metal workloads (such as databases) alongside virtualized and containerized applications with ease. As an example, if you’re currently running physical and virtual workloads with an aspiration to start testing containers and eventually rewrite your physical applications, the infrastructure is ready for this and can be repurposed. We have a series of workload use cases you can explore here, from client virtualisation to SAP HANA.

2. Disaggregated, fluid resource pools

HPE Synergy gives you the ability to scale your compute, storage and fabrics independently as needed. With HPE BladeSystem and other solutions in the market, it could be difficult to break the ratios of these technologies, such as how much storage you could allocate to a server. As an example, it’s possible to allocate up to 200 direct attach disks (using multiple D3940 storage modules) to a single server module, or run a compute only chassis. You could even run Software Defined Storage to make some or all of this storage addressable outside of the local servers, or of course connect to an external array such as Nimble, Primera, or 3PAR as Telent did (see the case study here).

3. ‘Infrastructure as code’

Using HPE Oneview and the RestAPI, you can call on these disaggregated resourced and carve up the right amount of instructure to run an application, flexing up and down as needed. The RestAPI allows you to integrate with a series of third parties in the cloud native ecosystem to script the actions required. It can be used to the extent of running one application in the day, and another at night. Using Infrastructure as Code, we can also create a true Hybrid Cloud experience using platforms such as VMware VCF or RedHat OpenShift, to call on resources both on premise and in public cloud, or you can create your own stack. BSO are one of our customers that use Synergy to offer worldwide access to business-critical services in their cloud offering and found a 15% saving of CAPEX and OPEX using Synergy.

 If you’re considering migration from HPE BladeSystem, please get in touch. We have a series of things we can do for you, such as running a TCO comparison with HPE Synergy or discuss the easy physical migration from C7000 using HPE Oneview. You can learn more about getting starter with HPE Oneview, here. We can also discuss alternative solutions in our wider portfolio (including HyperConverged solutions), depending on your needs.

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Zerrin Waller
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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