Hello, my name is Joe. I am a solution architect from Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
And today I am going to talk to you about composable infrastructure
and the first new product in this new category of infrastructure, HPE Synergy.
To start with, let’s compare different ways of deploying infrastructure.
A lot of traditional 3-tier applications are deployed on dedicated compute storage networking hardware
that is only used for running that one particular application.
This has advantages in that you have all of the resources of that infrastructure
dedicated to that particular application, from a performance perspective
and to grow into, in terms of capacity but we lack a little bit of flexibility.
We can’t share that resource very easily and there is a risk of it becoming underutilized
if that application is wrongly sized for the infrastructure that is provisioned on to.
To solve a lot of that, converged infrastructure allows us to share resources,
typically storage and compute platforms, all managed from a single interface
in a way that supports virtualization, physical resources, these sort of things.
The next level of infrastructure is hyperconverged,
where we turn those converged infrastructure technologies into easily deployed building blocks
that typically have very easy to manage interfaces and can be deployed in a scaleout manner
The final element on this new category of infrastructure from HPE is composable infrastructure,
where we take the same principles that we have used around sharing converged storage,
converged compute and the networking elements, but we make it more flexible and dynamic,
in terms of reallocating those resources to suit the application´s needs,
as we deploy them in these environments.
So, for instance, I may deploy a group of resources to tackle one particular application during the day
and a different application workload during the night on the same infrastructure.
That is something we can do with composable infrastructure
Composable is made up of a few key components.
The first is the compute storage and networking requirements
and what is different within composable infrastructure
is that these are fluid resource pools that could be dynamically reallocated.
This allows us to be more flexible and use those resources more efficiently.
The way that we provide that flexibility is through a software-defined wrapper
that can control how we template and allocate these resources.
Within Synergy, this is the HPE OneView solution that runs on the composer hardware.
The final element is the universal API that provides connections to all of our partner ecosystem,
all of our third-party integrations and allows that fluid resource pools to be accessed
through a single interface, without having to have separate interfaces for separate technology pieces.
Those three elements combined is the HPE Synergy value proposition.
But let’s focus in on this box to start with.
How do we deliver the fluid resource pools? We need some hardware to be able to do that.
Synergy takes a 12-bay frame in 10 U Rackspace
and within that frame are all of those compute storage and management resources.
All of the shared power and cooling needed to run the applications within that footprint.
It is a footprint that HPE has a long heritage with, it is very similar to our BladeSystem C-class
and has been a very popular platform for converged deployments.
Composable has built on that success.
In order to get the best out of these platforms we have also looked at how we innovate
around connecting groups of frames together
and that is something that we have done through Virtual Connect and through network fabrics.
Over here, I have drawn out three Synergy frames.
To facilitate a redundant network arrangement, you might expect that I would need to provision
two modules in every single frame in order to build this out in a resilient fashion.
What I could do instead is deploy a master module in the first frame
that can daisy-chain connect into the adjacent two frames.
So I only have to deploy one Virtual Connect module, but I am connecting in to 36 compute nodes.
This all acts is a single East-West fabric domain, which for virtualized workloads,
for big data workloads, is really important because it means one compute node in this frame
can easily communicate with a compute node, in a remote frame.
It is as though they are all deployed in one large enclosure.
For redundancy, what we also do is then maybe deploy another Virtual Connect module
on the B side fabric that can also connect into those two adjacent frames
for a fully redundant connection.
This is a massive benefit for Synergy in terms of scalability,
and ease of deployment for those modern applications.
We also address the storage requirements of modern applications by supporting
a number of different storage technologies.
Synergy can connect into existing SAN environments through Fibre Channel and also through iSCSI.
We can also connect into direct attached environments by deploying a storage shelf
inside the Synergy frame itself.
This allows me to connect up to 40 small form factor drives into a Synergy frame in a DAS environment,
really beneficial for software-defined storage technologies, like VSAN, for instance.
The final key element is how we manage and deploy the resources within Synergy.
This is achieved in two separate ways.
Within that frame, there are also spaces for two management appliances.
One is the composer, running the OneView software and connecting out to that API
that stores all of the state and all of the template information for that particular host.
The other is an Image Streamer that stores the operating system that is applicable to that host.
So I have all of my hardware state information and all of my software state information
able to be deployed alongside each other.
When I aggregate those two things together and point them at a piece of server hardware
in the form of a compute node, that is when that compute node takes on the personality
that it is given from these profiles.
Before those two things are allocated, this is completely stateless.
There is nothing that differentiates this compute node from any of the others in the environment.
That gives me ultimate flexibility in deciding how I deploy my applications
and my workloads onto composable infrastructure.
If you’d like to learn more about Synergy or composable infrastructure, you can go to HPE.com/Synergy.
I hope this was useful.