VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) : Disaster Recovery Automation Software

Many organizations have a disaster recovery site in place but when it comes to testing the DR site for fail-over, most of them do not have a clear plan or readiness for same, as it has always been a cumbersome process. Same applies to moving the Data Center or going for a DR in cloud. VMWare came up with a solution to this for a virtualized environment.

Site Recovery Manager provides simple and reliable recovery and mobility of virtual machines between sites with zero or very less downtime.  It integrates with the underlying replication technology like v Sphere Replication or array based replication solutions from major storage vendors to provide non-disruptive testing and automated orchestration of recovery plans.

SRM enables the IT team to do DR drills or recovery testing, as frequently as required, in an isolated network, so that production applications are not impacted. And the detailed reports generated in this testing ensures regulatory compliance.

If the client is using a certified stretched storage solution, SRM can enable live migration of applications between two sites. With this they can achieve zero downtime disaster avoidance or a seamless data center migration, whichever is the need.

SRM can use VMWare logical switches to map network and security policies across two sites , so that the network mapping process also becomes automated.

See a brief video on Site Recovery Manager Overview at below link.

http://bcove.me/i6vyrgr7

HPE Apollo : The high density server family for Big Data, HPC and Object storage

For very heavy workloads like big data analytics, high performance computing and object storage, massive scale up and scale out compute solutions are required.  They have to provide highest levels of performance and efficiency and yet be modular and scalable as required.  Hewlett Packard Enterprise Apollo family is designed to provide these solutions with excellent business benefits.

The various models in the Apollo family can be used in following various areas.

Traditional supercomputers are limited by huge requirements of power and cooling and semiconductor scaling.  With innovative cooling solutions like water cooling which is 1000x times efficient than air, and providing blade like serviceability , Apollo 8000 system reaches new heights of performance.

In the new world, to be competitive, organisations are looking to mine the growing collection of big data to unlock the insights that will allow them to streamline their operations and reduce costs. Apollo 4000 is purpose-built to service the technologies that are driving the Big Data IT revolution—Hadoop and other Big Data analytics solutions and object storage systems.

High performance computing is required to speed up research and get to market faster.  Traditional designs are limited by space and resource restrictions. The HP Apollo 6000 System delivers industry-leading performance in less space with the flexibility to tailor the system to precisely meet workload requirements.

The Apollo 2000 System provides a bridge to scale-out architecture for traditional data centres so you can achieve the space and cost savings of density-optimized infrastructure in a non-disruptive manner.

Together with HP Financial services to take care of financing the project and HP Technology services to execute the solution, HPE Apollo family can take care of massive, specialised computing needs of any organisation.

For more information,  please visit https://www.hpe.com/us/en/servers/apollo.html

VMWare Mirage : A new way to centrally manage your desktops and laptops

How you wished you could centrally manage all your desktops and laptops, migrate their OS, do break fix operations and enable disaster recovery without going for a complex VDI solution!  This is now possible with VMWare Mirage.

Mirage offers a unique solution that combines centralized management for IT and local execution for end users.  And although it is from VMWare no hypervisors or formatting required. It installs directly into Windows. 

When Mirage is installed in Windows, it creates a complete virtual copy of that end point in the Data Centre and keeps it synchronized.  Even if the user goes offline which can happen in case of a laptop, Mirage does the synchronization when the user comes back online.  And it works both ways!  Not only the changes at the end point get uploaded in the Data centre but it also included changes from the IT team (like migration, patch or application update etc) getting updated on the end point.

This is especially helpful in case of a OS migration. A single engineer can handle multiple OS migrations sitting at his place in the data centre!

Disaster recovery of desktops is also considerably easy.  Mirage keeps a backup of the complete image of the desktop, including personalization and not only data files.  So in case of a hardware failure or a complete replacement, the user desktop/laptop with all its earlier settings can be completely restored in minutes.

And Mirage works over WAN too!  It leverages deduplication both in storage and during network transfers making it easy to manage remote desktops/laptops in faraway offices where no IT team is present.

Watch a video explaining the concept of Mirage on our Facebook page

https://www.facebook.com/vintechin

HP Software offerings on Security Intelligence & Risk Management

Any modern business is under constant threat, either from outside or inside and unless proper measures are in place, it is exposed to a major loss of information, revenue and can even face a shutdown.

The HP Security Intelligence and Risk Management platform enables your business to take a proactive approach to security that integrates information correlation, deep application analysis and network-level defense mechanisms—unifying the components of a complete security program and reducing risk across your enterprise. 

HP ArcSight Security Intelligence platform helps safeguard your business by giving you complete visibility into activity across the IT infrastructure: external threats such as malware and hackers; internal threats such as data breaches and fraud; risks from application flaws and configuration changes.

HP Fortify Software Security Center is a suite of tightly integrated solutions for fixing and preventing security vulnerabilities in applications. It eliminates software security risk by ensuring that all business software is trustworthy and in compliance with internal and external security mandates. 

HP Tipping Point Intrusion Prevention System protects against advanced, targeted threats, delivers in-line inspected throughput speeds ranging from 20 Mbps up to 16 Gbps. For more information read the article elsewhere on this blog. 

HP Enterprise View  delivers decision intelligence to the CISO by providing real-time graphical and report-based identification of risks to the business within the IT infrastructure. Data is aggregated from risk assessments, vulnerability assessments, security configuration management monitoring, security event correlation and compliance state.

You can read an interesting Business White Paper on creating a defense system for your business at :

http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA4-3918ENW.pdf

HP Service Guard Solution for Linux

HP has combined it’s expertise in Unix and x86 environments to deliver industry leading availability and flexibility solution for mission critical x86 infrastructure with Service Guard solution for Linux.

HP Serviceguard Solutions for Linux are built from the same code base as HP Serviceguard Solutions on HP-UX. That means they have the same exceptional quality and attention to preserving data integrity. They deliver reliable availability and better system integration over your entire x86 environment. Availability, virtualization, and disaster recovery all work together, offering you greater flexibility when it comes to IT infrastructure choices.

HP Serviceguard Solutions for Linux are built to address the financial, business and operational impacts of downtime in a mission-critical x86 Infrastructure. With Serviceguard, you can define, implement, and manage solutions that help to secure the infrastructure, protect data and information, and align business continuity objectives to business requirements.

Maximize uptime with HP Serviceguard for Linux. HP Serviceguard for Linux does this by moving services between servers, so quickly and transparently that users may not even realize it happened. Serviceguard can move applications automatically, to protect you from a failure, or when you decide you want to use it, such as when need to perform maintenance.

If you need more information, check out

HP Serviceguard for Linux - Brochure

And

HP Serviceguard for Linux - Datasheet

PA RISC Environments on Integrity servers

Good news for all PA RISC legacy servers users!  HP now offers a brand new solution called HP 9000 Containers to help transition your entire application ecosystem to Integrity servers running HP-UX 11i v3.

HP 9000 Containers leverages HP-UX Containers, HP's shared OS virtualization technology, to offer application isolation and security for these HP 9000 applications running within the HP 9000 Container in an HP-UX Container. Clone the entire application ecosystem on your HP 9000 HP-UX system and move it over to an Integrity system.

You can now consolidate multiple HP 9000 ecosystems onto HP Integrity in a matter of days, with new HP 9000 Containers. These new tools virtualize PA-RISC environments on Integrity servers to eliminate resource burn with fast, easy migrations that shrink time and costs. Such HP UX environments transitioned from legacy PA RISC based HP 9000 servers to new upgraded infrastructure of Integrity servers can experience two to four times performance boost.

To know more about HP 9000 Containers read this document :

HP 9000 Containers - Overview

HP Proliant Gen 8 Servers

Recently I attended the HP Proliant Gen 8 launch in India.  I was expecting just a new generation of servers with the latest processors introduced by Intel. But that was not entirely correct. What I learned was that every HP ProLiant Gen8 server has over 150 new, customer-driven innovations that automate administrative tasks and improve application uptime and performance.

All these new technologies and development stems from Project Voyager, a 2 year, $ 300 million HP Engineering and development initiative to eliminate many manual tasks across the IT Lifecycle.  The aim is to create systems so intelligent that they virtually take care of themselves.  The Gen8 servers is the first step on this far reaching mission.

Basically all these innovations revolve around four main pillars, as briefly described below :

Integrated life cycle automation   Briefly this includes :

HP Intelligent provisioning.   The systems are online 3 times faster.  (all firmware, drives and tools preloaded and ready to deploy)

HP Active Health System.  Automate monitoring , diagnostics and alerting. (SmartMemory, SmartDrive. 1600 parameters monitored and logged separately. So problems analysis is 5 times faster

HP Smart Update.   (Systematically update servers with one click simplicity. Updates are 3 times faster with 93% less downtime)

Dynamic Workload Acceleration

Solid state optimized.  Next gen smart array controllers, 6 times the performance of previous generation.

Smart Data protection.  Advance data mirroring. Faster Raid setup. Lifetime data retention with  Flash backed cache.

Smart Data Devices.  Workload aware intelligence for real time application tuning and acceleration.

Automated Energy Optimization

HP Location discovery services.  Optmize workload placement with servers that self identify and inventory themselves.

HP Thermal discovery services.   To reduce energy usage and increase compute capacity.

HP Power Discovery services.  Eliminate power configuration errors and precisely track power usage by rack and server.

Proactive Service & Support

HP Insight Online.  Industry’s first cloud based IT management and support portal.

Proactive services.  Innovative new services based on HP Proactive insight architecture.

For more information please visit :

http://h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/whatsnew/proliantgen8/