Businesses operate in an increasingly complex and volatile global economic climate. While technology is continually advancing, business challenges only intensify, requiring IT managers and CIOs to do more with fewer resources and smaller budgets.
CIO’s face increasing pressure to optimize their network and meet expectations all while accelerating business growth, lowering costs, and managing risk. While CIO’s manage today’s immediate needs, their challenge is to adapt for tomorrow, improving business processes, enabling new business models and flipping their maintenance/innovation ratio.
Many vendor solutions strive to optimize business but rather complicate networks. Vendors focused primarily on innovative solutions create new technologies but lose sight of true organizational needs, often increasing complexity and cost at the expense of solving the overall challenge over time. This often increases the difficulty of managing an already complex network and further derails a business from focusing on true IT innovation.
When Ethernet was first created, the idea of using it in a large scale virtualized data center was clearly not even conceived. Consequently, designing a data center solely on Ethernet’s initial principles cannot address the needs of today’s data center. The explosion of large scale virtual environments have simply exceeded the limits of initial Ethernet and forced new innovation even on its base protocols – once simple, a data center network is now far more complex and advanced.
Ethernet now runs at 10,000 times its original speed and includes full switching, built-in Quality of Service (QoS), bandwidth allocation, resiliency, and virtualization technologies. The risk in this larger scale lies in hidden costs of managing the complexity of new capabilities vendors have provided and the inherent complexity it brings. Networking vendors must have a clear focus on creating innovative solutions that ultimately enable simplified – yet flexible – networks.
Information-driven organizations need large, fast, flexible networks with intelligence that can adapt to changing business needs. A network must support application management, promote efficient maintenance, and provide the ability to provision applications. The data center is no exception. Providing centralized control with the flexibility to deploy network policies and commands at the server edge is critical in enabling an organization to rapidly adapt to changing business and IT demands.
HP ProCurve Networking understands this need and offers a choice of adaptive enterprise solutions. Resilient core-to-edge connectivity, automated provisioning technologies, and the new 6120XG Blade Switch can reduce network complexity. Founded on the HP ProCurve Adaptive EDGE™ Architecture (AEA), ProCurve enables flexible authentication at the network edge for future application deployment. And you don’t have to sacrifice ease of use, existing capabilities, or risk your cost of ownership.
The trend of converged computing and networking points to the promise of delivering data, storage and communications through a converged fabric across the extended enterprise; a single wire for all enterprise applications and services, including VoIP, Video On Demand and secure access to enterprise data. Within the data center, HP is at the forefront: reducing network complexity and cost by offering newly converged blade switches and other networking technologies that dramatically increase virtualization performance and network flexibility.
The new standards-based HP ProCurve 6120XG Blade Switch enables businesses to reduce network complexity and deliver investment protection with resilient core-to-edge connectivity. Designed for the HP BladeSystem c-Class enclosure, the 6120XG Blade switch provides everything for data center migrations to next-generation 10-Gbps high performance architectures:
Perfectly suited for data center migrations to next generation 10-Gbps, high performance architectures, the 6120XG is engineered with emerging network standards in mind and is Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) ready.
When combined with the HP ProCurve DCM (Data Center Connection Manager), the switch delivers automated network connection management and provisioning while ensuring consistency of bandwidth services throughout the data center.
The integration of HP ProCurve data center solution increases HP BladeSystem's value by reducing acquisition and operational expenses, space requirements and power consumption. Additionally, HP ProCurve solutions are backed by the ProCurve Lifetime Warranty♦.
HP’s Virtual Connect offers newly enhanced capabilities to further simplify the data center network, lower connectivity costs and flexible data center deployments.
Ideal for virtualization and other high-performance applications, Virtual Connect can provide twice the Fibre Channel bandwidth at a lower cost per 8-Gbps than competitor’s solutions. Businesses can dynamically change network connections and adjust bandwidth with the new Virtual Connect Firmware Update with Virtual Connect Flex-10. This combination reduces complexity and provides expanded support for up to 128 virtual local area networks, VLANs.
Through this new shared, business-ready environment, HP offers IT capabilities that provide innovative services to the business. These converged infrastructure solutions can help improve the economics of networking by enabling businesses to shift resources from technology administration to business innovation.
As the speed of technology accelerates, HP continues to invest in developing solutions that offer business-ready infrastructures with reduced complexity and cost of operation. Through a unique and refined combination of products, solutions, services and people, we look to continually evolve with the needs of business.
To learn more about the convergence of the network and blade visit HP.com.
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