Today we're gonna take a look at the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Synergy Data
Systems designed for use in your enterprise, whether that's a small data
center or whether it's a growing data center or a very large data center.
We're going to be looking at a hardware aspects of the HPE Synergy
system but I want to keep in mind for that your software solutions are really
what's important here. So whether you're running bare metal or whether you're
running virtualized or whether you're running containerized we really want
your software solutions to run the best on HPE Synergy systems and that's really our goal.
Now what we're going to do today is we're gonna look at the hardware. We're
gonna look at the front side and get some information, then we look at the
back side look at some information of a typical Synergy-type system but keep in
mind through all this the software is what's important. Let's take a look
inside this typical rack and see what's in here.
This is a somewhat typical rack setup.
What you're looking at here is the basic HPE Synergy 12000 frame which sits in a 10U package.
Below it is another Synergy 12000 frame another 10U package.
Below that is another 10U package which is our older C system -
BladeSystem C7000 system. All these are bladed infrastructure for the data center.
Now we're going to concentrate on this package,
what we call the HPE Synergy 12000 frame. This is the basic unit of
Synergy that most people would be looking at purchasing and they would
expand this into more units as they want to expand their data center.
At the heart of this particular center view system is something we call HPE Composer and this
sits in a management bay on the left hand side. This is actually the brains of
the system. There is one bay here and below it there's another bay. This one
happens to be empty which could be for an HPE Synergy Image Streamer system and we'll
talk about what these are. These are management appliances. Now what's
important about the Composer is you cannot run HPE Synergy without the
composer. This is the brains and it runs HPE OneView.
This is very important because HPE OneView is what allows us to translate
hardware resources into software resources that can be used by the
software applications. Remember this is a software-driven world so whether you're
using the GUI for system and administration and running your
solutions or whether you're running all the solutions on a Synergy system from
another application they and going through a RESTful API they will be
working through HPE OneView. We would claim that HPE OneView is what allows us
to do composable management. Composing compute and storage and networking and
even software images in order to match hardware resources quickly to the
software solutions that you need to run. So the game is: compose the hardware
resources quickly and efficiently to run your solutions, change them quickly and
continue to run in a manner that fits your data center. Now in this
particular case this entire package that we call Synergy this frame it's very
important understand that this is entirely designed for redundancy and
high-availability. We want this hardware system to stay up and running as much as
possible as long as possible so that you can run your software solutions
efficiently and effectively without downtime. So Composer is the main brains
of the system. Typically you would have one Composer in one frame and we would
typically have another Composer in a second frame such as this one down here
and we do this for redundancy. This is a hardware fail-over model. One of these
Composers would automatically fail-over to run on the other Composer.
With these two composer management appliances we can run up to 21 frames
with just those two Composers. Now, what are we going to run? So, one of the
typical things that you would have in a frame like this are compute modules or
servers if you will. Here what you see is a typical Synergy 480 compute module.
This is a 2 processor module with 24 DIMM slots. This is a very effective
package of what most people would typically use. You have a lot of cores for running
compute tasks. Keep in mind also that you could also put graphics processing units
or GPUs in with these systems also and that would allow you to do graphic tasks
such as BDI, for example for a video desktop interfaces and we have a very
high density - among the highest density - of GPU capabilities with Synergy over
seven hundred concurrent users in this 10U package could be a VDI or
graphics purposes. This is what we call a compute module. This fits in what we call
a half-height slot and if you count the number of slots we have here we would
have one, two, there is three, four this is occupying two (we'll talk about
this in a minute), five, six and then another six down here so you have 12
half-height slots so you can have up to 12 of these servers
running in one 10U frame. So 12 servers in a 10U package is what we call it.
Now keep in mind also there are other types of servers we've have and the fact
down here. This is actually a HPE Synergy 680 of a Gen9
variety which runs actually more compute and more memory for more demanding tasks.
This one actually takes up 4 half-height slots. There's actually one
here that's a single server which takes two half-height slots.
Typically today you would either run a 480 such as one of these in a
half-height or a 660 which we run two slots for more demanding applications in
the compute area. Now we're gonna move up and take a look at this module right
here. This is a specialized module which is a storage module we call it the
D3940 Storage Module. This allows us to do composable storage. What you have here is
actually a tray of disk drives these are hot pluggable disk drives and if you
look at the side you can see individual disk drives and this is only has 10 disk
drives in it but in reality you could put up to 40 small form-factor disk
drives in this one storage module. Now think about that for a minute -
That would allow you to put up to 2 terabytes
per disk drive times 40 slots. That would allow you to put 80 terabytes of
storage into these two half-height slots. These disk drives for the Storage Module
can then be allocated to servers for use in whatever solution they're running.
Now this is very important because this allows us to carve up storage
for use as the workloads need. This allows us to compose the storage to the
workload. Keep in mind if you have VSA software virtualization storage array
software you could actually share this these disk drives across to other frames.
also the other thing that's important to note is if you for example we're using
these 40 slots with 2 terabytes each 480 terabytes total in that package you
could actually extend that and put in multiple of these modules in a single
frame here we have a single module in this frame we could put up to one two,
three, four, five of these storage modules in a single frame and we could still
have to compute modules there for use by your solution if you need that much
storage locally. This is a tremendous amount so 80 x 5 you're talking
about half a petabyte of storage. Potentially with larger disk drives it
could even be more. For some types of applications this is very beneficial for
a very large storage nearby to where the commute modules are. Now keep in mind you
also have other storage options for example a 3PAR Storage Array is a very
typical SAN storage array that we would put with this Synergy system Nimble
Storage you could also use storage that comes from other vendors the one thing
you would sacrifice is the the composability of that storage, but you
can certainly run the typical storage of other vendors also with a Synergy system
you're not limited in that respect. I'd like to stop for a minute
look at a few other things here. We have front panel access for Synergy here. So
the system administrator would need that. We also have another piece of this puzzle
which is actually not shown here but would fit into this other management
appliance bay. We talked about Image Streamer. Image Streamer is a
specialized function. It looks like the Composer but it actually
is another management appliance which works with the Composer Management
Appliance it's specialized function is to rapidly deploy and update your
solutions and what that allows you to do is do some things with the software
images and run stateless in a way that we have not been able to achieve
before. Speed is a key here so one of the ways people do that is to add capacity
quickly to a running solution add another compute module, bring it online,
update software quickly for some security reasons.
Another way they would use an Image Streamer type solution is for what we
would call workload swapping or workload switching you can think about this in
terms of what happens during a day of a data center say during the day you have
all the compute modules of your Synergy frame running VDI for a video
teleconferencing for say a call center at five o'clock the call center closes
down the people go home we then use Image Streamer to repurpose all the compute
modules with a different workload see a computationally heavy task like database
work and it runs all night on computationally heavy tasks. In the
morning, the call center people return and the Image Streamer re-purposes all the
compute modules back to VDI for video teleconferencing this allows us to make
very effective use and efficient use of our hardware resources in a way that we
could not do before. Keep in mind that I showed this is a day/night type problem.
In reality, Image Streamer is much quicker than this we could repurpose our
workloads as fast as we can reboot servers, so it could be a matter of
minutes that we do this. Now we've talked about a lot of things here. Keep in mind
that the brains of the system runs HPE OneView this is a capability which maps
the hardware resources to logical software constructs. So we can
understand compute, storage, networking, even software images for the most
powerful profiles and templates in the industry. Which allows us to use a
RESTful interface and allow other software
to come in and run this system and run their workloads possibly without even
touching other interfaces going straight from our one application and straight
into the RESTful API s into the Synergy systems that run the workloads
efficiently. Now previously we were looking at the front side of the Synergy
rack now we're gonna turn around look at the back side of the Synergy rack.
There's a little more noise back here because we have fans blowing back
here but one of the first things you'll notice on the back side of the rack is
the lack of cables. One of the advantages of the blade system infrastructure is the
cable management is so much cleaner than that of a rack structure or data center.
So there's a few cables but it's a much cleaner environment. Now looking at
the back side of the rack it may be more difficult to recognize. Here's one of the
frames we talked about earlier and here's the second frame below it you'll
notice that this looks very similar to the older systems we had in BladeSystem
also and one of the reasons is we learn from our older infrastructure and some
of them it's very similar so we have modular fans in this case (10 fans) and we
have 6 power supplies and these are set up to be redundant so we can actually
lose one. One of the subtleties of the Synergy infrastructure is that this has
a much more efficient power and cooling infrastructure than previous generations.
That's very important because as we move forward all the different
components of the system the processors the memory the storage is running hotter
so having a more efficient power and cooling infrastructure is very important
as we go forward. One of those things you will see here is you will see actually
three independent and redundant interconnect modules so this is for
moving data. So for example, if you look carefully you'll see the top one
which runs the full width of the Synergy frame. The redundant one is below it and
then you have a second redundant interconnect module and finally a third
redundant interconnect module. Remember everything is designed in the hardware
for redundancy and high-availability so you might be using these for example for
connecting up fibre channel or ethernet or fibre channel over ethernet. In this
particular case, we are running an interconnect module we
call Virtual Connect from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. This is a very
efficient, resilient and very effective way of moving data. In this particular
case, we have one of the master satellite modules up in the first frame and a
redundant one in the second frame, so that we have failover capabilities.
This allows us to actually link different frames together for data purposes and
make it look like a single switch to a top rack switch this actually has no
aggregation and no latency also. You can link up to five different
frames this way for data purposes. One of the other capabilities
that's a subtlety of this architecture that's very important is something we
call the Frame Link Module and if you look carefully you see a couple wires
going into this little piece on the left-hand side.
This frame link module does several things. It is really a resource manager
for the frame. One of the things that will do is automatically
discover all the resources in the frame. So when you first attach the wires and
the power cables for HPE Synergy and you flip on the power switch, the Frame Link
Module will go out and it will look at all attached frames and will discover
all the resources and present those to you in HPE OneView. We also have an
installation technician mode which allows the installation tech or possibly
a contractor to have access to what she needs to to correctly identify the
physical configuration. It will identify incorrect cable configurations for
example and show them in red so that she knows to correct those and where to
correct those. Once she has corrected all those, the resources are all presented
now correctly in green and HPE OneView She could turn that over to a software
administrator who has full access to the power of the software for setting up the
logical structure of the software. One of the other things that the Frame Link
Module does is it will provide your management links up into your management
network. An important aspect of this particular Frame Link Module is that it
separates the data from the management network.
This is really important. This allows us to prevent a Denial-of-Service attacks
which are caused when you try to overflow from data on one side into the
other side to gain control of a management network. So separation of the
data and the management network is very important. It's also called out-of-band
management. This is a very important aspect that the Frame Link Module allows and
as its name suggests, the Frame Link Module links frames so
there's a link port that allows us to daisy chain from one frame to another
frame and this linking capability allows us to link up the 21 frames (still only
using two composers) for managing all that. That is one of the capabilities
so I can link up the 21 frames with 12 compute modules each.
Now keep in mind all these capabilities are designed really to run
software solutions we have a lot of capabilities that we provide that you
cannot see in hardware. For example, we provide Synergy software releases. These
are tested solutions of software that allow you to actually run the software
and be assured that they've been tested as solutions together, so that you have
stable systems running. We also have things like Insight Remote Support
capability. The remote support allows you to have phone-home capabilities should
that be of interest to you to identify potential failures and hardware before
they happen and them repaired or you can access them remotely. We have iLO
advanced capabilities which is a remote console access so
even situations where the server may be down. In many cases, many of the system
administrators are remote from the physical system, so having the remote
capabilities of iLO Advanced for example or Remote Support are very
important in the data center environment. Now we've been talking about Synergy and
this is the back side. We've been talking about hardware but keep in mind, this
is composable management at its best. We use extremely powerful HPE OneView
templates and profiles to manage compute, storage, networking, and even software
images. To be able to match up the software solutions that you want to run
with the hardware resources and quickly composed
and recompose those so that your data center runs both efficiently and
effectively to make your business a success. Thank you and hope to
see you soon.