In recent years there has been a trend toward increasing workload density. A decade and a half ago, you would generally run one workload on one hardware chassis. While it was certainly possible to install different products, such as Exchange Server or SQL Server, on the same server running Windows 2000, administrators would generally avoid doing so unless they were deploying a Small Business Server-type solution. If you were doing enterprise IT on Windows systems in those days, you’d rarely see SQL Server and Exchange Server on the same chassis in a production environment.
All that changed with the widespread adoption of virtualization. As virtualization became more entrenched in production environments, it became more common to see SQL Server and Exchange Server deployed on the same hardware chassis--installed on separate virtual machines rather than on the same host operating system, where they would share disk space and the Windows registry.
Looking beyond virtualization, containers are the next development in increasing workload density. With virtualization, you need to deploy not only the workload, such as SQL Server, but also the host operating system in the virtual machine. The operating system component of the virtual machine consumes disk space, processor cycles and RAM. With containers you can virtualize just the application workload, meaning that the resources usually allocated to disk space, processor cycles and RAM in traditional virtualization are freed up to increase workload density.
Containers are one of the workloads that converged architecture systems are designed and optimized for. Using CA, you get the benefit of increased workload density that comes in running containers. You also get a hardware chassis that is explicitly designed and optimized to host container workloads. This is important because containers are likely to be as important to the next decade of IT infrastructure as server virtualization has been to the past.
Underwritten by HPE
Part of HPE’s Power of One strategy, HPE Converged Architecture 700 delivers infrastructure as one integrated stack. HPE Converged Architecture 700 delivers proven, repeatable building blocks of infrastructure maintained by one management platform (HPE OneView), built and delivered exclusively by qualified HPE Channel Partners. This methodology saves considerable time and resources, compared to the do-it-yourself (DIY) approach.
Based on a complete HPE stack consisting of HPE BladeSystem with Intel® Xeon® E5 v3-based HPE ProLiant BL460c Gen9 blades, HPE 3PAR StoreServ all-flash storage, HPE Networking, and HPE OneView infrastructure management software, the HPE Converged Architecture 700 can be easily modified to fit within your existing IT environment.