HP Nonstop - In Cloud

Cloud design and implementation service

 

Setting up a cloud environment only for deploying Virtualized NonStop (vNS) systems is justified if scale permits i.e. you are building the infrastructure to host several vNS systems in the cloud or if you have a longer term vision to bring in more workloads currently running on other platforms (e.g. Linux, Windows) over to vNS in your private cloud. 

If you do not already have a cloud environment, you need to start from ground zero!! Setting up the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) using OpenStack private cloud is no easy task and requires you to invest time and resources to design and implement it.

 

Designing, implementing and managing a private cloud is a specialized IT practice. You will seldom be able to do it reading through the cookbooks or web literature or user manuals or any such “do it yourself” approaches. If you want to design your datacenter using the cloud paradigm, you are better off in some expert hands.

 

Relationship between HPE and redhat

 

Leveraging the long term partnership between HPE and Red Hat, the NonStop Enterprise Division (NED) and Red Hat offers you the cloud design and implementation service using HPE gears.

 

Red Hat is a market leader who popularized the adoption of open source technologies, particularly Linux, in the modern Enterprises. They distribute OpenStack under the product name Red Hat OpenStack Platform (RHOSP) which NonStop supports as one of the deployment environments.

 

RHOSP brings in the required pieces to the OpenStack software to enable smooth cloud deployment and brings in high availability and manageability features that are so essential for enterprise grade cloud Deployment.

 

So, if you are thinking where to start, you should probably consider HPE and RedHat to help you do your cloud.

 

Support for VMware environment

 

Virtualization is a mature market today and, according to Gartner, many

enterprises have virtualized >75% of their  x86 workload (Source: https://www.gartner. com/newsroom/id/3315817).

 

VMware is the dominant player in this market and deserves credit for much of this wide adoption of virtualization in today’s enterprises. It has a robust virtualization offering under the vSphere suite and a strong cloud manageability portfolio under the vRealize suite.

 

Many NonStop customers trust VMware for their mission-critical IT needs.

Support for VMware is the next logical step in enabling vNS’ wider reach into the Enterprise IT. In the upcoming release, vNS will support deployment in a VMware based virtualization environment.

 

While VMware has a robust portfolio of products for the cloud market, a large portion of the installed base use vSphere mainly for server virtualization and management requirements.

 

For deploying vNS, you would only require

• the ESXi hypervisor,
• the vCenter management appliance and
• the vRealize orchestrator which are fairly standard products in a VMware environment.

In other words deploying vNS in your VMware environment should be no different compared to how you deploy other Virtual Machines (VMs).

You would of course require specific Network Interface Cards (NICs) in your compute nodes to leverage some of the unique features that only NonStop offers and no one else. The icing on the cake of course is that it’s the same NonStop L-Series software!!

 

So, the same program built for the L-Series platform can now also be deployed on VMware.

NonStop Dynamic Capacity (NSDC)

With cloud comes the flexibility. While vNS offers you the flexibility to deploy your workload in an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) built using your choice of hardware and software components, the upcoming release goes one step further.

 

NonStop Dynamic Capacity (NSDC) is a new offering, for the very first time on NonStop, and offered only on HPE Virtualized NonStop!! NSDC would provide you the flexibility to scale your system to meet transient demand spikes. For example, if your workload demand grows up during a festival season or your DR system needs to be activated until your production system can be brought back online, you no longer have to configure the system to manage the peak load. You only need to configure it for the normal traffic with a reasonable estimate of demand growth.

 

When the system needs to step up temporarily to handle a demand spike, you can fire up additional cores of your NonStop CPUs so that they are able to handle the spike. You can now imagine the savings this could accrue to the total cost of running your Mission-Critical workload on Virtualized NonStop!!