Datacentre Networking Dynamics

The fundamental nature of datacentre computing is rapidly changing. The traditional model of separately provisioned and maintained server, storage, and network resources are constraining datacentre agility and pushing budget envelopes to the limit.

Many IT organisations are recognising that these static pools of isolated resources are being underutilised. Deploying new, more scalable virtual technologies apply new pressures to the multiple networks in your datacentre increasing the burden on the IT teams that support them:

• Virtual machines are driving much more frequent changes to network configurations
• Datacentre network processes must be coordinated through multiple IT teams and are too time-consuming
• Increases in server utilisation require more network bandwidth per server
• Traditional hierarchical network designs cannot scale nor provide the performance, low latency, availability, and quality of service demanded by a virtualised datacentre
• Blade technology is increasing the number of connections and bandwidth requirements.

Introducing HP FlexFabric

HP FlexFabric is the next-generation, highly scalable datacentre fabric architecture of an HP Converged Infrastructure. With FlexFabric, you can provision your network resources efficiently and securely to accelerate deployment of virtualised workloads. With highly-scalable platforms and advanced networking and management technologies, FlexFabric network designs are simpler, flatter, easier to manage and grow over time. This open architecture uses industry standards to simplify server and storage network connections while providing seamless interoperability with existing core datacentre networks.

HP FlexFabric overviewHP FlexFabric brings together a highly-scalable, high performance, secure network infrastructure with comprehensive management and policy-driven connectivity provisioning integrated into a datacentre converged infrastructure.

The Converged Infrastructure Architecture

Virtual Resource Pools

Delivered through a common modular infrastructure of virtualised compute, memory, storage & network resources

Datacentre Smart Grid

Providing intelligent energy management across systems and facilities

FlexFabric

Creating a common, wired-once, virtual I/O network

Matrix Operating Environment

Enabling a common management platform to manage technologies from infrastructure-to-application

Why Flexfabrix?

FlexFabric can enable your IT organisation to build a wire-once datacentre that responds to application and workload mobility, and provides resource elasticity. Dynamic provisioning capabilities fully exploit virtualised connections to achieve new levels of data centre efficiency and accelerate time-to-service. The FlexFabric management and provisioning tools help align the fabric with governance policies and service-level agreements (SLAs), while reducing the cost of operations.

FlexFabric benefits

• Improved business agility, faster time-to-service and higher resource utilisation
• Breakthrough cost reductions by converging and consolidating server, storage, and network connectivity
• Predictable performance and low latency
• Modular, scalable, industry standards-based platforms and multi-site, multi-vendor management tools
• Investment protection for existing Layer 3 core systems with seamless compatibility and support for open standards
• Flexibility to manage and administer server, storage, and network resources in any organisational model
• Removal of costly and time-consuming change management processes.

FlexFabric delivers true “networking-as-a-service” to the various consumers of connectivity within the datacentre and accelerates deployment of applications and services. It provides a unified connectivity infrastructure – across servers, storage, and networking – that dynamically adapts to the demands of the heavily virtualised and more flexible datacentre architectures of tomorrow, while meeting increasing pressures for price/performance and time-to-service.

Simplifying the Network

By radically simplifying and flattening network designs and using emerging datacentre networking standards, HP FlexFabric creates a more robust, flexible, and efficient datacentre network infrastructure. Rather than relying on a traditional hierarchical networking architecture, FlexFabric offers a flatter datacentre topology with edge intelligence. This allows resources to be created, moved, and scaled from centralised connection pools on the fly, putting to work an integrated resource and provisioning management toolset.

FlexFabric is designed to support the back office, cloud, web, or high-performance computing models. Instead of locking organisations into a proprietary end-to-end solution, FlexFabric gives them the flexibility to incrementally deploy a heterogeneous data centre network that meets their workload needs and protects existing investments.

• Predictable performance supports diverse workloads Open and standards-based for investment protection
• Pragmatic deployment of new technologies
• Datacentre integrated management and provisioning for business agility.

Deploying FlexFabric

Equanet's established solutions team can help you to deliver networking as a service to the Converged Infrastructure with HP FlexFabric. The HP Converged Infrastructure blueprint and FlexFabric technology enable the predictable performance, high availability, and comprehensive management needed to support large-scale virtualisation and convergence implementations, and a spectrum of IT deployment models—including cloud computing, web hosting, and managed services.