Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

HP ConvergedSystem 200–HC EVO:RAIL available now!

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Yesterday I was informed by the EVO:RAIL team that the HP ConvergedSystem 200–HC EVO:RAIL is available (shipping) as of this week. I haven’t seen much around additional pieces HP is including, but I was told though that they are planning to integrate HP One View. HP One View is a management/monitoring solution that gives you a great high level overview of the state of your systems but at the same time enables you to dive deep when required. Depending on the version included HP One View can also do things like Firmware Management, which is very useful in a Virtual SAN environment if you ask me. I know though that many people have been waiting for HP to start shipping as it appears to be a preferred vendor for many customers. In terms of configuration, the HP solution is very much similar to what we have already seen out there:

  • 4 nodes in 2U each containing:
    • 2 x Intel® E5-2620 v2 six-core CPUs
    • 192 GB memory
    • 1 x SAS 300 GB 10k rpm drive ESXi boot device
    • 3 x SAS 1.2 TB 10k rpm drive (VSAN capacity tier)
    • 1 x 400 GB MLC enterprise-grade SSD (VSAN performance tier)
    • 1 x H220 host bus adapter (HBA) pass-through controller
    • 2 x 10GbE NIC ports
    • 1 x 1GbE IPMI port for remote (out-of-band) management

As soon as I find out more around integration of other components I will let you folks know.

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Comments

  1. (Disclosure: I work for HP Storage)
    As of now, OneView is not integrated with the HP ConvergedSystem 200-HC EVO:RAIL. Plans are that it will be but can’t give any timing information. Personally, I think HP should be a top consideration for any EVO:RAIL deployment as HP has over 1200 certified VMware professionals and is the number one vendor for virtualization with VMware.

    The HP ConvergedSystem 200-HC StoreVirtual which has storage based on StoreVirtual VSA does have OneView integration with deeper integration coming over time. This solution has a couple of different flavors (performance or capacity optimized) and I did a video walk-through of the it on this video: http://youtu.be/euHgJsZ-nK4

    There are a few posts on my blog that go deeper: http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Around-the-Storage-Block-Blog/bg-p/139/label-name/hyper-converged

    Cheers!

  3. HP delivers a differentiated Hyper-Converged customer appliance experience
    HP has COE support team dedicated to provide appliance level support for EVO:RAIL helping to improve fault isolation and repair time.
    HP has tested and validated EVO:RAIL installation processes on HP ProLiant helping to reduce installation issues
    HP has more certified VMware Certified Specialists than anyone else except VMware (source VMware)
    HP has support engineers trained on EVO:RAIL installation processes helping to reduce installation issues
    HP and VMware are working on the development of Integrations with HP One view to simplify management of the appliance
    HP can help reduce life cycle management complexity by creating and validating software and firmware compatibility at an appliance level
    HP has 14 year relationship with VMware integrating solutions

    HP ConvergedSystem 200-HC EVO:RAIL became orderable 2/9/2015. If you are interested here’s where to find more information Hyper-convergence: simplify your virtualization environment
    http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Converged-Infrastructure/Hyper-convergence-simplify-your-virtualization-environment/ba-p/180000#.VNvUC_nF98E

  5. I wonder if there will be someone willing to do a comparison of all the EVO:RAIL products once they’re all GA…. =)

    In my opinion, it’s probably going to be the feature set that each vendor bundles in with an EVO:RAIL that sells it.

    • I was told it was being planned for, but haven’t heard anything since either. Not sure if/when it will happen

  7. Still not sure I follow this. As SDDC becomes more mature, why would we want HP to provide anything more than hardware?

    If you look at the large data centers, they are quickly heading toward white boxes. This is because the software orchestrates the configuration and service deployment to the box. As all boxes they deploy are the same, there is little value in them and they are disposable.

    So, with VMware’s end state being SDDC, why would we inject VSA, OneView, or other technologies? Would we not prefer a commodity “cookie cutter” comprised of VendorX hardware and VMware software?

    • Seems to me the question is like asking why should we have anything besides vanilla ice cream – I don’t want chocolate chips in my vanilla or any other flavor. If “we” (not clear who “we” is, thus my quotes) don’t want to buy anything but EVO:RAIL and want a cookie cutter solution, that’s a customer choice. If HP wants to offer a differentiated solution, that’s HP’s choice.

      I think HP offers the best of all options by offering customer choice: EVO:RAIL and 200-HC StoreVirtual System. So if you want vanilla, chocolate chips in your vanilla or another flavor, HP has that.

      • interesting…. so HP offer the ‘vanilla’ EVO:RAIL flavour…. and the 200-HC flavour?
        Is it just the StoreVirtual data services that gets added onto the latter, am I right in saying it looks like it’s HP VSA rather than virtual SAN?

        I guess if someone just wants a vanilla EVO:RAIL they would just go buy a supermicro version! =)

        • Not exactly. We’re adding chocolate chips to the vanilla. And that’s the beautiful thing – customer choice. HP is adding value and customers get to decide.

          Also, one of the significant differences besides HP VSA is the pricing. 200-HC StoreVirtual last I heard was considerably less than EVO:RAIL.

          • Speaking of pricing does anyone have any ballparks for the 200-hc? I am trying to avoid the normal sales call “fun” if I already know its out of range for my company.

          • There are 3 different models of the 200-HC:
            >> EVO:RAIL
            >> StoreVirtual all HDD (capacity optimized)
            >> StoreVirtual mix of SSD and HDD (performance optimized)

            I don’t have any of the pricing; drop me an email and I’ll see if I can find our list price. hpstorageguy at hp dot com.