HP Insight Dynamics - VSE Business white paper

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“Freeze” and “thaw” profiles.
A blade profile can be stored as ready-to-use, or
“freeze-dried.” Then in the event of unplanned down-
time, you can use a spare blade (either locally or at
a distance using the Insight Recovery option) to get
the profile up and running, or “thawed,” in about the
time it takes to re-boot a system.
These same capabilities help you maintain availability
during planned maintenance. When you’re ready to
take a server down for maintenance, you can easily
move a blade or virtual machine over to another phys-
ical location. After you have updated the firmware or
made other changes to the hardware, you can then
move the logical servers back to their original systems.
This can help you shrink maintenance windows con-
siderably when compared to the time needed to bring
a server down for the entire duration of the mainte-
nance work. And because you can shrink the window,
this maintenance can often be done at a more conve-
nient time than, say, Sunday at 3 a.m.
Dynamic infrastructure provisioning
Quickly repurpose test and development
infrastructure without reinstallation.
Today, test and development teams wrestle with ineffi-
ciencies. Average server utilization in test environments
is often in the single digits. Moving, testing, or trouble-
shooting applications on stand-alone servers can be
a cumbersome process that stretches across multiple
organizations.
Compared with production environments, test and
development environments need to be set up quickly.
They are often used for a relatively short period of
time, and then they are retired. What’s more, the
actual demand on the workload is usually character-
ized by short, high levels of utilization, followed by
long periods of little or no use.
Given these operating circumstances, test and devel-
opment environments need more than static, stand-
alone servers. They are best placed in an agile
computing environment, in which resources can be
easily reallocated throughout the test and develop-
ment lifecycle. While virtual servers are a common
approach, they are not suited for all test environments.
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE enables a more dynamic
test and development environment for both physical
and virtual servers. It allows you to quickly create,
distribute, and tear down development and test envi-
ronments. This is made possible by the use of logical
server profiles. This is one of the keys to accelerating
the development-to-production cycle.
HP Insight Dynamics – VSE helps you accelerate time
to production by sharing hardware between test and
development teams and archiving test environments
for reuse, a task that can usually be accomplished in
a matter of minutes. This is one of the keys to main-
taining a dynamic test and development infrastructure
that can respond faster to business needs.
Automate infrastructure provisioning and repurposing.
To gain greater agility, you can extend the dynamic
infrastructure provisioning capabilities of the HP
Insight Dynamics – VSE suite by adding HP Insight
Orchestration software. This option enables your IT
organization to provision infrastructure consistently
and automatically from pools of shared resources
using standardized templates and a self-service portal.
With HP Insight Orchestration, you can rapidly provi-
sion resources ranging from a single virtual machine
to complex multi-tier environments with physical and
virtual servers and storage systems.