HP Extended Cluster for RAC Continuous availability with the flexibility of virtualization

Business dilemma
If a group of CIOs was asked to identify their primary cause of stress, the majority would answer
“controlling IT risks and costs.” Indeed, many would say that this is the most important challenge
within a CIO’s charter.
In striving to balance risk management and fiscal responsibilities, every IT manager is faced with a
difficult choice. On one hand, risk can be reduced by investing in duplication and redundancy, but
on the other hand, costs can be driven down by exposing the organization to increased levels of risk.
Therefore, simultaneously lowering both risk and cost ostensibly is mutually incompatible.
A previously acceptable and widely adopted approach to risk management was for an IT
organization to purchase excess equipment to create a pool of surplus CPU, storage, and connectivity
resources. This method was effective for dealing with various adverse situations. However, in today’s
cutthroat and fiscally cautious business climate, it represents a highly visible example of poor
utilization of IT assets.
To allow for changes in business conditions, IT systems are typically configured to handle maximum
anticipated loads and designed to be scalable, with additional hardware. This approach provides a
fair degree of flexibility, but it does so at the expense of asset utilization. HP studies have shown that,
on average, system use ranges from 20% to 40% of available resources, yet it is not unusual to see
many applications bottlenecked by resource constraints.
For many years, HP has been providing solutions that maximize clients’ return on IT investment. By
combining innovative technologies with proven industry-standard solutions, HP now ushers in the next
generation of solutions that increases utilization, manages risk, and makes the most of IT
expenditures.
The solution
Context for the solution
The Adaptive Enterprise is the HP vision for helping customers synchronize business and IT to
capitalize on change. Virtualization enables you to balance two seemingly contradictory concepts—
cost and agility—by pooling and sharing servers, storage, networking, and other infrastructure
devices and allocating them across applications and processes as your business demands them. The
new Adaptive Enterprise has management capabilities to sense changes in business demand and
trigger the dynamic supply of virtualized resources.
HP defines virtualization as managing an IT environment as a single entity by pooling and sharing
resources such that supply automatically meets demand in real time. This holistic approach allows the
entire IT resource pool to be viewed as a single virtual entity that can be allocated—through business
priorities and policies—to dynamically serve the requirements of the enterprise.
In isolation, virtualization over extended distances has the potential to actually increase the burden
placed on IT organizations. However, by combining virtualization with powerful real-time automation
tools, HP has been able to create a compelling suite of solutions that exploit previously underutilized
assets without causing additional IT overhead.
HP has included the core of its intelligent virtualization concept in the VSE portfolio of solutions. Each
of the VSE offerings is fundamentally designed to achieve a common set of objectives:
• Improve return on IT investment
• Provide enhanced functionality to accommodate and exploit business volatility
• Enable elevated levels of IT service to the enterprise
• Present unrivaled choices for the management and mitigation of risk
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