I do spend a lot of time on the road, literally. If I have a choice I will always opt to drive to meetings no matter how far away they may be, even if it takes me a Friday evening and all of the weekend to get there,I will head for the highway in a heartbeat. No matter which highway you take, and as much as you may enjoy the journey, eventually you come to journey’s end and irrespective of the route chosen, whether high-speed interstate highway or a more scenic back road, convergence begins the closer you get to your destination. Somewhat abstract to begin with, with the routes diverging radically from one another at first, and where the compass bearing for each path followed seemingly at odds, the compass needle invariable swings back to a common heading as we seek our destination.
How similar this is to how very large companies pursue strategies, particularly those companies awash in the riches of multiple, often competing, product offerings. When it comes to HP and to their Converged Infrastructure –Ready (CI-Ready) initiative, at first my observations followed a similar line with a vague understanding of journey’s end, but with compass needles gyrating wildly. But no matter, what HP has in mind as a Converged Infrastructure, despite what we may have first thought, it’s a part of what new HP CEO, Meg Whitman, is referring to as the new “one platform.”
Through the years, I have admitted to being a fan of the movie series, “The Highlander”, and have featured the storyline several times in previous posts. However, when it comes to HP and its pursuit of the one platform, CI-Ready isn’t about a single architecture or even about one operating system – it is the acceleration in adoption of commodity components and technology packages. According to HP’s web site, under the heading of HP Converged Infrastructure – Delivering the Data Center of the future, HP claims “Infrastructure convergence is widely accepted as the optimal approach for overcoming IT and application sprawl to transform IT into a true business enabler. It does so by establishing a shared services data center environment to simplify and accelerate IT, significantly lower operational costs, shift resources to innovation, and drive business agility.”
In the ebook HP offers on its web site, Converged Infrastructure for Dummies, there is further explanation as to the necessity for converged infrastructure, suggesting that “to compete in this instant age, organizations need an IT infrastructure that enables agile and rapid service delivery. They expect their IT organization to deliver applications and services that are fast, always available, scalable, and interoperable while driving down costs.” But again, where is convergence headed and what can we expect at the end of the journey?
In his January – February, 2012, commentary in the NonStop community publication, The Connection, Bill Highleyman quoted Martin Fink, Senior Vice President and General Manager, HP Business Critical Systems (BCS), as supporting this observation when he said “the ‘open, integrated single platform’ is the HP BladeSystem. This is the ‘new platform’ referenced by Meg Whitman. In one platform, all operating systems can be intermixed – Linux and Windows on the x86 architecture and HP-UX, NonStop and OpenVMS on the Itanium architecture.”
This makes a lot of sense to me. When it comes to overcoming IT and application sprawl, convergence will not be around one operating system, just as it isn’t around one language or run-time environment. Nor is it about one chip-set or about one blade package. It’s about a chassis that has been engineered where it matters little whether the blades that populate the chassis are x86 or Itanium, or whether it’s Linux or NonStop – this cleverly designed chassis houses them all and as Fink observed in his quote for Highleyman, “in one platform, all operating systems can be intermixed!”
In covering the convergence in the context of the recently announced Odyssey initiative, where HP’s platform strategy was embracing Intel’s x86 architecture, and in so doing leverage capabilities from HP-UX, NonStop and OpenVMS to better meet the requirements of mission-critical applications planning to run on Windows or Linux, my latest post to Real Time View, “A heads start on Vegas”, I quoted Fink again when he suggested that “Project Odyssey isn’t just about x86 but about our continuing investment in HP-UX, OpenVMS, Integrity (based on the Intel Itanium processor) and NonStop. When viewed all together, particularly should you be using NonStop, this represents great investment protection – a message I am sure all of the NonStop community must appreciate.” Yes, with Odyssey, Converged Infrastructure throws the net wider, and that gives us even more flexibility.
Converged Infrastructure and the CI-Ready initiative weren’t about pursuing a path that leads to single architecture. It wasn’t about mandating conformance to just technology or architecture, or to one language or even to just one database implementation. It was about ensuring industry standards were embraced and modern languages were exploited even as greater adherence to all that is now being viewed as open. But how will this roadmap better address business needs? The reduction of IT infrastructure complexity through a single platform is just a starting point, after all.
In this case, I believe it will be led by the data. We are moving beyond the need for just a robust SQL offering, to where we will likely support “big data” on one platform, “unstructured data” potentially on another, continue to run our data stores on yet another, and house our warehouses on potentially one more platform. Big data on Linux, unstructured data on windows, data stores on NonStop and warehouses on Unix is only one example that comes to mind. Repositioning or redeploying applications to more cost-effective platforms, based on the value of the transaction’s content, may eventually take place, and solutions vendors may step up to making the investment required, but well before that time data will be accumulating in a variety of databases, all resident in relevant stacks on blades within the BladeSystem.
Products that efficiently move data and provide data integration will become a priority and as they do so, then monitoring solutions such as those provided today by IR with Prognosis, where multi-platform support is in place, will become a priority too. If data is moving, there will be many within a company anxious to understand how their business unit or division is faring and the need to provide analysis across platform, even as data is in flight, will carry with it greater significance to all within IT. With its history supporting NonStop as well as Linux, Unix and Windows, Prognosis will likely play a very high-profile role as we come to terms with BladeSystems as the one platform where all operating systems can be intermixed! We may still need to cover a little more road before reaching our destination but with these announcements by HP over the past few months, the compass needle is firmly pointed in the right direction and is quickly negating the stress we may otherwise have suffered. And that alone may be all the NonStop community has been seeking ever since NonStop became a part of HP!
