Adding a dash of storage and services to the converged infrastructure mix

Building on the strength of its installed base of CloudSystem Matrix (CSM) customers in India, HP is planning to sell services alongside the boxes and boost the attach rate of 3PAR storage to CSM. By Prashant L Rao

HP has arguably been the quickest of the mark in establishing a beachhead for deployments of converged infrastructure in India. Its CloudSystem Matrix (CSM) has been a hit with over a hundred boxes having shipped to 45 customers in India. Now, the company intend to build on that by adding services and storage to the mix.

Santanu Ghose, Country Head, Converged Infrastructure Solutions, HP India, argued that the hundred CSM boxes shipped by HP were all bought with the intention of creating a common resource pool. “We see customers opting for automation, with the aim of provisioning services rapidly (in less than an hour),” he added. Basically, it boils down to Cloud computing of the private kind.

Adoption patterns
To date, the IT/ITES sector has been the biggest adopter of CSM, largely driven by the need for IT heads in this sector to assign resources to projects and recover the same when said projects are done.

However, this is by no means the be all and end all of converged infrastructure adoption as far as HP’s customer base of these solutions is concerned. Organizations in the BFSI vertical that face situations of peak loads during the end of the day, month, quarter or year have also found CSM to be an attractive proposition to handle the load that shoots up by 50-60% on such occasions.

Then there’s the focus on DR in BFSI. Here, again, the Cloud has a role to play. CloudSystem Matrix in conjunction with 3PAR storage supports moving apps from a production environment to the DR setup and back, rapidly. It also lets IT managers move apps from a physical to a virtual environment and vice versa.

In the telecom sector, HP’s sold these solutions to Cloud Service Providers (CSP) and telcos for VAS. Globally, telcos maintain a ratio of 20% active subscribers. That figure’s substantially higher in India in part because Indians tend to talk three times longer on an average. For CSPs, the ability to thin provision using 3PAR is a plus.

Brad Parks, WW Converged Infrastructure Strategist, HP Storage, HP Company, commented, “3PAR built its business by designing storage for IT as a Service. These boxes run hundreds or thousands of apps/workloads without performance taking a hit.”

In the manufacturing sector, conglomerates abound and the Group CIOs of these concerns like to create a common resource pool across Group companies. These groups typically run ERP, point solutions such as shopfloor apps, SCM, production planning etc. “We have Cloud Maps, a templatized approach for each and every application that determines the configuration and performance levels etc for that particular app,” added Ghose.

New directions
IT/ITES is starting to emerge as an independent vertical for HP. The organizations in question include MNCs R&D centers, captive BPOs, Indian IT players with a global footprint et al. This has traditionally been a stronghold for players like Dell and Cisco. HP’s clearly keen on making inroads here.

The company is also keen on selling 3PAR along with CloudSystem Matrix. In FY 12, the attach rate of some form of HP storage to CSM was as high as 80%. Going forward, the company is counting on an attach rate of 50% for 3PAR with CSM.

Parks said, “CSM & 3PAR are designed for the same use cases. Today, they are fully integrated. CSM can automatically handle policy-based provisioning and QoS on 3PAR storage.”

An eye on the mid-market

HP’s contention is that SMBs are ready for the Cloud. “We are pricing the combination of CSM, 3PAR and our Cloud Start Services attractively for this segment,” commented Ghose.

When pressed as to the ballpark figure for this combo, he said, “A typical SMB IT investment is in the region of Rs 40-50 lakhs. We are talking about a cost in the same ballpark.”

Apparently, many of the existing CSM deployments are at SMB sites from the IT/ITES and BFSI sectors.

Parks added, “We have two programs here. One is Get Thin where we guarantee that your capacity requirements will drop by 50%. The other is Get Virtual where we will double the number of VMs that you are running per server.”

Deployment time is one aspect that HP is stressing upon. “57% of our customers found that deployment time went from months to weeks with CSM. 21% managed it in days,” said Ghose.

Today, we see legacy (that’s what they call conventional IT setups nowadays) or private Cloud environments, the managed private Cloud (IDC hosting) and the public Cloud. “We see a hybrid model emerging where an organization uses all three and moves workloads from one environment to another as required,” concluded Ghose.