30 Minute Interview

“Virtualisation and x86 make sense from a price-performance perspective”

Tony Parkinson, VP & GM, Industry Standard Servers, Asia Pacific, HP, and Rajesh Dhar, ISS, HP India, talk to Shivani Shinde about the recently launched C-Class blades, HP’s experience selling AMD- and Intel-based servers, virtualisation vs consolidation, and Linux adoption on the blade platform

Rajesh Dhar

HP has recently launched a new category of blade servers, the C-Class. Could you tell us something about that?

Dhar: A lot of innovative stuff and cutting-edge technology has been incorporated in this release. Along with this we are doing a three-city launch at Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi. This release has some new features such as a mid-plane of 5 TB, up from the earlier 2 TB, the reason being that we want these servers to be around for the next five years and be able to handle the changes that will result over the next five years. The other feature is cooling through the parsec architecture.

In what way did this launch differ from your earlier blade launch?

Dhar: When we did our earlier launch we released a lot of ads in the newspapers but that did not translate into sales. We realised that both within the company and in the partner eco-system nobody knew about the benefits that blade servers delivered other than space utilisation. This time around, we identified 70-80 partners in India and trained them in the benefits of blade technology. We invested in two demo centres at Bangalore and Mumbai, and that has changed the uptake and understanding of blades. Today we have about 250 customers across different verticals. With the C-Class we are taking it to the next level, and you will see large-scale adoption in data centres.

We do about 80-85 percent of business through partners. We have introduced a dedicated programme for our 80 to 100 enterprise-level partners. We trained them and gave them equipment at concessional rates for the purpose of demonstration. What we have seen is that adoption is now better as partners are better trained to understand and sell the concept. Potential customers can come to the demo centres to test their applications. Some customers using blades are Raymonds, iSoft and HCL BPO. The starting basic price for our blades is about Rs 4.81 lakh, including the cost of the enclosure and the blade servers.

Tony Parkinson

Parkinson: The other big change is that customers are not looking only at acquisition cost but also at how much it is going to cost them to run the technology. This is a big shift, especially from the infrastructure perspective. If you look at the X86 server market, it is the fastest growing market in the region in terms of year-over-year growth. At the same time, it also reflects the shift in application usage into a standards-based environment. We have observed that blade products have succeeded in the large enterprise segment. They have the ability to reach the mid-market segment too.

The other change is in the way that IT infrastructure is being built. The traditional way is changing. It might be working but it is not proving to be efficient. Customers are looking for a platform to build their next generation of IT infrastructure—one that is flexible, easy to maintain, and better utilises the skill-sets available.

We can now put more blades in a framework than we could before. With the C-Class we have re-architected blade infrastructure.

Blades are perceived as being for the SMB segment. Do you agree with this?

Parkinson: We see C-Class blades driving into both medium and large organisations. Anybody with 15 servers or more is a candidate for this technology, whereas those with only 5-10 servers will get benefits but may prefer to stay with rack mounts due to cost considerations. In the C-Class we have provided an LCD panel in front of a chassis that changes colour to show where the problem is. This has been leveraged from our printer technology. Thus, trouble-shooting is faster.

When it comes to servers, virtualisation is an old concept but it seems to be getting associated strongly with blades. Why is that?

Dhar: A few years back when a bank wanted to deploy a core banking system it would talk about a huge system with a lakh of TPMC rating. Today, go to any co-operative bank and most will say that they are using an x86 architecture. During the last few years x86 has seen some amazing performance jumps with technologies such as dual and quad core emerging. A four-CPU quad core x86 server could deliver a 300,000 TPMC rating. You can run any application on it. The price-performance that x86 provides is mind-boggling.

Virtualisation and x86 make sense from a price-performance perspective. With blades, when you virtualise, you are simplifying the business that is supported by IT, but the infrastructure that you are creating for virtualisation is complex, and we believe that by using blades it is easy to manage a complex virtualised set-up. This is the reason you will hear a lot of people talking about blades and virtualisation in the same breath.

Parkinson: In traditional consolidation you might go from 50 to 25 servers. That’s good as you reduce the number of physical devices by 50 percent, but you haven’t fundamentally improved your utilisation. Meanwhile, virtualisation has matured as a concept. We have been doing virtualisation on our Unix platform for almost 10-12 years (HP-UX). In terms of functionality maybe we haven’t reached the right stage, but then VMware is real and has been widely deployed. Customers are moving up from the expensive, proprietary Unix platform to Windows or Linux.

There is a perception that x86 servers are used in the application tier and not in the back-end. Do you envision x86 systems taking over every aspect of a three-tier IT set-up?

Parkinson: One of the biggest ProLiant customers in this region is China Power. Would you see a ProLiant replacing NonStop Himalayas at the BSE? Technically, from a pure hardware perspective, it could happen. What’s probably holding it back is the application system. If we looked at Unix four years ago and Windows four years ago we could not have said to someone that we can replace your proprietary environment with x86 from a software hardness perspective. Fast-forward to the present day and we have 64-bit Windows, Windows SQL 2005 with full clustering, full 64-bit. Could SQL server 2005 replace Oracle on the back-end system? Depending on the load, yes it could be. Having said this, in terms of workloads there are workloads that x86 servers just can’t handle. Similarly, our Superdome-class products with 128 CPUs can run workloads that a string of ProLiants cannot manage. If you look at the worldwide data, Unix sales are on a flat-to-declining ratio. But Unix is also eating into the mainframe business, so in many countries we are replacing IBM mainframe products with our Unix offering.

Dhar: India is one of the few countries where Linux, Windows and Unix are all growing. The phenomenon of x86 adoption and Unix are occurring in different industries. If you take banking, banks started with total branch automation and went on to deploy hundreds of servers, but then they realised that they were creating pockets of information; now they need to connect, and they need a huge server for CBS. If a bank is looking to connect, say, 2,000 branches, then x86 servers do not have the capability. The good thing that is happening in India is that instead of buying a mainframe they went and bought a Unix box.

Take the government, they are in the first phase of computerisation and they are buying servers in huge numbers. For instance, India Post has about 2,000 to 3,000 servers. They will slowly talk about consolidation and have a main server somewhere. If you will see, in terms of units sold, Unix does not have the numbers, but if you take transactions from a value perspective Unix is bigger. As business IT set-ups mature, you will see big-ticket Unix transactions happen, but widespread adoption will happen on x86. What we see in India is very large Unix transactions that are low in numbers but big in revenue terms. This trend of consolidation will take place across verticals.

HP has AMD- and Intel-based products in its x86 portfolio. How has the Opteron business done?

Parkinson: Customers who had earlier said no to Opteron have adopted servers built around the chip. We have included and announced support for the Rev F generation, and have seen our competitors doing the same. The biggest beneficiary of Opteron has been the customer. This has also woken up Intel, and they have caught up in the two-socket and four-socket space. We are chip-agnostic because Opteron is better for some workloads, and the same holds true for Intel. When it comes to blades, until recently Opteron had about a 50 to 60 percent marketshare because it consumed less power, something Intel could not get right. When it comes to blades we have a relatively bigger marketshare with Opteron than Intel. The other thing is that we do not have a four-socket Intel blade. If a customer wants to have a four-socket then we have only an Opteron offering.

2-, 4- or 8-way—what is the trend in India?

Dhar: We have seen amazing activity in the 4-way segment. As a category, 2-way had become predictable. That’s changing with dual and quad core coming in. The other thing driving the four-way segment is Linux. Two things happened. Novell and Red Hat have been able to bring some discipline to Linux. Customers now know that if something goes wrong with a Linux application there is a company they can hold accountable for it. Possibly sharing the look and feel of Unix has helped, for we have seen a lot of adoption on Linux around four-ways for database servers. A lot of Oracle implementations on Linux have taken place, and that is driving the four-way market. We have about 25 percent of the four-way market, and as a category it is growing two or three times faster than it used to.

Parkinson: We did have an eight-way server, but we discontinued that because the upgraded four-socket dual core Xeon server that we announced some time back will be 16-way in some time. Once again it comes down to the application level. If you look at the four-socket dual core Opteron platform, it has performance levels that match that of the first-generation Superdome that we had three years ago.

Is there strong Linux adoption on the blade platform?

Dhar: We see Linux adoption in high performance computing. AMD works very closely with organisations in this segment. CAD/CAM, chip design and EDA are areas where companies are adopting the AMD and Linux combination. Digital content creation is another area where people are adopting Linux. Many oil and gas companies are also adopting Linux in a big way.

You compete with IBM in blades. How are you faring?

Dhar: About three quarters back when we announced this programme, IBM had about 80 percent marketshare in this category. I think this quarter could be a surprise. We believe that our client base is more broad-based than those of our competitors. They have clients in the oil and gas vertical, but these are certification-dependent. Unfortunately, our products were not certified so we do not have reach there. Other than that, in terms of spread and partner knowledge we are ahead.