* HP provides both servers and storage to Pentel
For Matt Staver, information technology manager for Pentel in Torrance, Calif., servers and storage go hand in hand.
Staver replaced an aging HP9000 server and an HP SAN with HP blade servers and an HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array 4000.
“We were looking at a couple different SANs,” says Staver. “We liked HP servers and we wanted one vendor who could provide both servers and storage – a vendor we could call for both services and support.
Management of the new SAN was also important to Staver. “The management HP offered for storage was simple and straightforward. HP had virtualization for its storage. There was one giant pool of storage and you could pull storage from it when you needed it. You didn’t have to slice it and dice it up — it was just one big pool.”
Staver installed six HP ProLiant BL465c AMD Opteron processor-based servers and one HP ProLiant BL 685c AMD Opteron processor-based server. Each server is virtualized with VMware’s ESX and hosts Oracle E-Business Suite 11i and Oracle Database 9i databases.
“We consolidated our infrastructure to show the entire VMware environment, Exchange as well as our Oracle production servers,” says Staver.
He also uses the servers and storage in concert. “All our blade servers boot from the SAN,” says Staver. “We store our virtual machine images on the SAN. We are using shared storage to take advantage of VMware’s VMotion to move virtual machines from one physical server to another when we need to upgrade or patch a server.’
Provisioning new servers from the SAN has also eased management for Staver. “It takes us under an hour.”
