Convergence is Critical Sales Guide - How to sell HP Business Critical Server technologies in a Converged Infrastructure Landscape

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Convergence is Critical Sales Guide - How to sell HP Business Critical Server technologies in a Converged Infrastructure Landscape
Convergence is Critical
Sales Guide
How to sell HP Business Critical Server technologies in a Converged Infrastructure Landscape
Convergence is Critical Sales Guide - How to sell HP Business Critical Server technologies in a Converged Infrastructure Landscape
Contents

■   Introduction
■   The Business Critical Server/Converged Infrastructure Ecosystem
■   The Technology Behind the Solutions
■   Opportunity Spotting: Business Drivers & Trends
■   Compelling Reasons to Buy
■   Objection Handling.

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Convergence is Critical Sales Guide - How to sell HP Business Critical Server technologies in a Converged Infrastructure Landscape
Introduction

Convergence is Critical

For years, organisations that rely on IT have been adding more and more servers, storage, and networking devices,
in an effort to keep pace with the demands of business applications and the terabytes of data they generate. Over
time, these IT resources have became locked within countless technology silos – each devoted to a particular
application or line of business. To meet service level agreements (SLAs), these silos have created IT resources that
are over-provisioned, underutilised, and collectively difficult to manage. The result:

■   An increasing percentage of IT budgets spent on operations rather than innovation
■   An inability to deploy new IT services quickly to meet business demand
■   Diminished productivity, due to increasing levels of complexity
■   A lack of space and unnecessary facility costs.

From x86 servers to Superdome, HP’s next generation business-critical server portfolio delivers the industry’s first
mission-critical Converged Infrastructure in one platform – eliminating silos in the datacentre while improving the
performance of data intensive IT environments.

For the first time, it’s possible to deploy, automate and manage any number of application workloads using a single
platform built on HP modular Blade Scale Architecture. This simplifies operations and optimises resources –
enabling organisations to use one set of tools, management software and modular components in a ‘pay-as-you-
grow’ fashion across the entire enterprise.

Delivering the industry’s first mission-critical Converged Infrastructure, HP’s business-critical servers provide a
flexible foundation for the future of mission-critical computing – aligning IT to business demands, with:

■   A common modular infrastructure
■   A common network fabric
■   Comprehensive cross-domain control
■   Comprehensive power and cooling management.

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Convergence is Critical Sales Guide - How to sell HP Business Critical Server technologies in a Converged Infrastructure Landscape
The Business Critical Server/
Converged Infrastructure Ecosystem

                                                                      Always-on
                                                                      Resiliency

          Storage                         Servers         Unified blade
                                                          architecture
                                                           from x86 to
                                                          Superdrome

                                                         FlexFabric
Power & cooling                                Network

                                                                Matrix
                    Management Software                       Operating
                                                             Environment

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Convergence is Critical Sales Guide - How to sell HP Business Critical Server technologies in a Converged Infrastructure Landscape
The technology behind the solutions

Unified blade architecture, from x86 to Superdome

Simplify by consolidating applications on a common platform

HP’s Blade Scale architecture includes a common, modular platform for critical applications, a common way to
connect to networks, a common way to optimise energy usage, and a common console to manage your
infrastructure. It will help organisations move from “one-of-everything IT” to a modular “one IT that does everything.”
The result is a common, mission-critical platform from x86 to Superdome systems. By standardising the way that IT
systems are designed, deployed and managed, the Blade Scale architecture enables organisations to certify once,
train once, and deploy once.

The unique structure of the revolutionary Blade Scale architecture allows organisations to start with just one blade
and grow all the way up to Superdome 2, adding new capacity in seconds as needed to scale with business
demands. Plus, the breadth of partitioning capabilities with HP Integrity systems lets you dramatically increase
utilisation within each blade – from sub-CPU based virtual machines to electrically isolated hard partitions.

Key Benefits:
■ Improve IT operational excellence with flexibility for expansion and consistent management

■ Reduce IT acquisition cost for servers, storage, networking, and management software.

■ Reduce ongoing IT support costs:

  – simplified configuration and provisioning for servers, storage and networks
  – lower power and cooling, server management, and administrative costs
■ Create a more assured path to IT success with an integrated and optimised Converged Infrastructure.

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Convergence is Critical Sales Guide Introduction | 06

FlexFabric

Flexibly scale resources to any workload
HP FlexFabric is a virtualised, high-performance, low latency network that consolidates Ethernet and storage
networks onto a single fabric to dramatically lower network complexity and cost. HP FlexFabric moves network
intelligence away from the core switches and closer to the application, thereby simplifying complex hierarchical
network infrastructures. It improves flexibility and resource utilisation by connecting physical resources to the
network once, and then dynamically remapping connections based on application requirements. This unique, wire-
once approach enables organisations to easily flex connections and performance to meet changes in workload
demand, through a single management console.

HP utilises FlexFabric technology to independently adapt I/O, memory and processor to precisely provision and
repurpose capacity as required, providing high-speed business performance. Organisations can easily add blades
over time and can combine multiple blades into a single, flexible system. With HP’s Virtual Connect, they can wire-
once and adapt connections on the fly, thereby reducing cabling by 97%. Without the need to manually rewire with
each blade addition, organisations gain the flexibility to scale quickly as needed to support business demand.

For the first time, HP FlexFabric fully virtualises network connections to allow organisations to move applications
freely across or between datacentres and deliver network ‘as a service’.

Key benefits:
■ Dynamically adapts network protocols and scales capacity to match application demand on the fly

■ Instantly migrates connections as applications move across different resources

■ Provides predictable performance and quality of service governed by security and service-level policies.

Always-on Resiliency

100+ innovations to ensure global business continuity
HP has the experience and expertise with mission-critical environments to provide always-on technology to help
meet SLAs. The Blade Scale architecture has incorporated over 100 innovations – allowing organisations to power
on once and ensure global business continuity. With power-on-once technology, HP delivers a resilient design and
online, ‘tool-free’ serviceability that keeps applications available during maintenance. Innovations such as the Blade
Link and Superdome 2 Crossbar Fabric have engineered scalability and robustness directly into the heart of HP
systems, with self-diagnosing, self-healing features.

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Convergence is Critical Sales Guide Introduction | 07

Breakthrough efficiencies with HP’s next generation business-critical
servers include:

■   Up to 450% improvement in infrastructure reliability over previous generations, with the new HP Integrity
    Superdome 2
■   Up to nine times the performance in half the footprint, with the with new HP Integrity server blades
■   Up to 50% improvement in application deployment time and the fastest failover in the market, with the HP-UX 11i v3
    Operating System
■   Payback in as little as 60 days, with the HP ProLiant DL980 G7 server.

Matrix Operating Environment

Instantly adjust infrastructure to business demands
The Matrix Operating Environment delivers a common management platform that automates infrastructure lifecycle
management. It optimises the management of server, storage and network resources in compliance with core
business, security, and regulatory policies. This approach radically simplifies an organisation’s ability to manage IT
as a service.

The entire infrastructure for an application can easily be deployed or changed via the service catalog delivered
through a common management platform. A business user can quickly and easily request a service from this
catalog. Approvals can happen much more rapidly, and resource allocation and provisioning is automated and
integrated with core IT processes to ensure proper change management and compliance.

HP Matrix Operating Environment transforms today’s highly customised, manual processes and tools that are unique
to each application and component. Instead, organisations benefit from a shared, standardised environment that
accelerates time to service delivery with high quality, while optimising resource utilisation and ongoing operations.

Key Benefits:
■ Provision infrastructure service in minutes

■ Optimise infrastructure confidently

■ Protect continuity of services.

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Opportunity Spotting:
business drivers & trends

IT sprawl is having a seriously negative impact on business performance
For 40 years, IT infrastructures have been built the same way – different systems supporting different applications,
connected with lots of wires in different ways, and managed manually by different teams, tools and processes. IT
complexity inhibits business flexibility, innovation and uptime, so customers are looking to go from ‘one-of-everything’
IT to one open, common IT Infrastructure that does everything.

Under-utilised and non-optimised resources
Customers are looking for ways to react faster to new opportunities, but their datacentres are suffering from IT
sprawl as a result of too many (or oversized) servers being purchased over the years as a means of addressing
gaps in availability. With pockets of under-utilised capacity now trapped within different systems, resources are not
readily available to support the growth and drive strategic IT initiatives.

More demanding SLAs, but fewer IT resources
Customers are frustrated with today’s inflexible, hard-wired systems and complex processes that require too many
people of highly-skilled, expensive or siloed talent, in order to adapt and grow.

Opportunity Spotting:
■ Monolithic, siloed environments causing complexity and underutilisation

■ Expensive, inflexible IBM environments preventing innovation and growth

■ Sprawling, complex and over-sourced systems, tools and processes from many vendors

■ Need to meet more demanding service levels, whilst also reducing costs

■ Worried about the phase-out of HP 9000 or Sun SPARC systems

■ Considering consolidation, virtualisation, application upgrades, migrating away from home-grown applications, or

  evaluating a move to Linux
■ Concerned about the technology roadmap and risk associated with Oracle’s acquisition of Sun.

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Compelling Reasons to Buy

HP Installed Base Modernisation

Don’t wait until your customers ask the question. Talk to them about transitioning from legacy HP 9000 or older
Integrity systems as a means of improving IT performance and lowering costs. Take the HP Converged Infrastructure
message to your customers to prevent competitive attacks from Sun or IBM, and position HP as the vendor of choice
for modernising their entire IT environment.

Questions to ask:
■ Are your HP 9000 systems/older Integrity systems meeting your current business objectives?

■ Do you have too many single-workload servers?

■ Can your servers cope with unexpected peaks in demand?

■ What is your strategy for virtualising your mission-critical environment?

■ How much of your strategy have you implemented?

■ What’s been successful?/What’s proved challenging?

■ Is your IT team spending too much time on maintenance?

■ Have you delayed or avoided application upgrades due to concerns about migration risks?

■ Are hardware/software support costs too high?

■ Have you been successful in delivering shared services or a private cloud?

Focus on:
Converged Infrastructure
■ Explain how you can take their mission-critical environment forward with a Converged Infrastructure –

  standardising, simplifying and consolidating to create one unified infrastructure that delivers everything
■ Explore the key benefits and ROI from HP Integrity systems with Blade Scale architecture – providing a common,

  modular platform, always-on resiliency and unified management for all their critical applications
■ Focus on the increased flexibility they will gain to dynamically react to business demand and the common interface

  for connecting networks, optimising energy usage and controlling and managing the entire infrastructure.

Migration
■ Explain the HP Evolution Program, which delivers specific assessments, services, porting and migration tools,

  along with best practices to help upgrade to HP Integrity and HP-UX 11i v3
■ This is a much smoother transition than moving from HP 9000 to a competitive environment, such as AIX or Linux,

  which required recompiling of applications
■ Transitioning to HP-UX 11i v3 from v1/v2 can usually be done for zero licence costs. And with the new socket-

  based licencing, software costs won’t go up when processor core counts increase
■ The latest release of HP-UX 11i v3 brought advanced enterprise and mission-critical capabilities, including:

  – mission-critical virtualisation
  – higher capacity for more demanding workloads
  – built-in security with integrated high availability and disaster recovery solutions
  – integrated, centralised management.

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Convergence is Critical Sales Guide Introduction | 10

Oracle/Sun Competitive Attack

Solve their uncertain future – positioning HP-UX as the secure choice for migration. Take the HP Converged
Infrastructure message to your customers as a key differentiator. If an OE discussion is required, demonstrate the
functionality leadership and credibility of HP-UX against Solaris and AIX, before the customer decides to move their
mission-critical environments to Linux in a bid to save costs.

Questions to ask:
■ Are your SPARC servers more than 3 years old?

■ How has the age of your systems effected support, maintenance and management costs?

■ Are you currently using HP servers in other areas of your business (e.g. ProLiant or Blades)?

■ Do you have concerns regarding Oracle/Sun’s solution strategy and roadmaps for SPARC?

■ How do you feel about being charged by Oracle to run Oracle Solaris?

■ Are you concerned about ceding more control of your IT to Oracle/Sun?

■ Have you upgraded to the latest version of SAP?

■ Have you faced any challenges with the upgrade or in production?

■ What other business applications are you planning to upgrade?

■ What home grown applications do you maintain and what’s your strategy for continuing support or porting them to

  new systems?
■ How is IT sprawl impacting on your datacentre and what has been done to address it?

■ Are you looking to deliver shared services or build a private cloud?

Focus on:
Infrastructure deployment options
■ Focus on the fact that Oracle’s aggressive appliance strategy is high-priced and highly-siloed, offering little

  flexibility and choice. It’s also very new and so untried and tested
■ Explain the flexibility and breakthrough efficiencies of HP’s next-generation mission-critical servers. With a

  common, modular platform from x86 to Integrity Superdome, a converged solution can be created across the whole
  IT environment that will lower TCO and reduce licensing costs.

Best investment for the future
■ Focus on the long roadmap provided with HP’s Blade Scale architecture and Integrity systems – both at the

  processor and OS level. This will enable them to scale up and out within the platform and utilise common
  tools/processes across the datacentre
■ Explain how their staff’s UNIX-related skills are fully transferable, with up to 70% or Oracle Solaris system

  management tasks lying in the pure UNIX skill set and therefore directly applicable to HP-UX
■ Steer them away from Linux as a valid option for mission-critical environments. Though lowering costs is always

  a powerful incentive, they need to consider hidden costs such as the impact of downtime, extra
  licensing/support/management required to ensure integration and reliability, and the numerous Linux upgrades.

Simplified transition
■ HP offer complete porting of application code, free training services/tools/global experts to help manage the

  transition, free assessments for Oracle application and/or SAP infrastructure migration, and numerous programs
  for financing/leasing/trade-in/trade-up to help keep costs down
■ Over 50% of SAP deployments run on HP       . Even SAP’s internal SAP ERP 6.0 system runs on HP Integrity
  servers. HP have a 20+ year partnership with SAP and can offer ‘Migration-in-a-Box’ services for SAP to ensure
  a smooth transition.

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Convergence is Critical Sales Guide Introduction | 11

IBM Competitive Attack

Take the HP Converged Infrastructure message to your customers as a key differentiator and position the benefits of
this strategic approach for their mission-critical environments. Many IBM customers are feeling trapped and
frustrated with out-dated, siloed, expensive environments, in which maintenance costs may be consuming as much
as 70% of their IT budget. Find a way in through discrete production or test/development environments, where HP’s
price-competitive, common-platform position will be particularly well received.

Questions to ask:
■ Has your mission-critical environment struggled to keep up with changes in your business?

■ What flexibility challenges do you have in rolling out new business services quickly?

■ Have you had issues with manageability/integration that have impacted on business operations?

■ Are you looking to deliver shared services or build a private cloud?

■ How have major hardware upgrades or modernisation efforts impacted on infrastructure planning, budgets

  and productivity?
■ Have changing workloads caused the purchase of more/upgrade of existing IBM systems?

■ What levels of responsiveness do you require across your mission-critical environment and are those levels

   currently being met?
■ Have support costs grown along with your aging infrastructure?

■ Are you under pressure to reduce IT expenditure?

■ What percentage of your IT budget is spent on maintenance?

■ Have you evaluated the prospect of modernising your legacy environments?

■ Would a unified, modular IT infrastructure have a positive impact on your business?

Focus on:
Converged Infrastructure
■ Explain how a Converged Infrastructure tackles the issues associated with proprietary, siloed environments

■ Focus on how HP’s approach standardises, simplifies and consolidates everything from the start – helping to

  move their mission-critical environment from a ‘one of everything’ approach, to ‘one IT infrastructure that
  does everything’.

Best investment for the future
■ Avoiding legacy application modernisation carries a big risk for organisations. Not only are they missing out on an

  opportunity to gain a competitive advantage by employing more adaptive and effective systems, but they also face
  the possibility of their platform becoming obsolete and unsupported without a clear path forward
■ Focus on the fact that HP Integrity systems with Blade Scale architecture offer a unified, modular platform for all

  their critical applications – giving them increased flexibility, with the ability to react dynamically to business demands
■ Explain how HP is the only vendor that offers the breadth and depth of innovation and expertise to bring everything

  together – helping to optimise existing investments whilst building an IT infrastructure for the future.

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Objection Handling

HP Installed Base Modernisation

“My HP 9000 servers are working just fine. Migrating to a new technology and operating systems seems like a big
risk and cost.”
By upgrading to HP-UX 11i v3 and moving to new Integrity systems, you’ll gain the advantages of a common,
modular infrastructure across your entire datacentre. You will save money through reductions in power/cooling costs
and a smaller footprint, and will also enjoy better performance and utilisation, while simplifying the management of
your mission-critical environment.

“We are considering a move to Linux to save money.”
Saving money is important, but have you considered the total costs and risks associated with a move to Linux? Have
you looked beyond the acquisition costs to evaluate the hidden costs such as downtime, Oracle licensing costs for
RAC, or Linux upgrade and support costs? By moving to HP Integrity systems with HP-UX 11i v3, you benefit from a
fully integrated operating environment and comprehensive mission-critical services that can deliver a lower overall
TCO than Linux.

“We’re considering a move to IBM AIX from our HP-UX 11i v2 on HP 9000 servers.”
Whilst it’s always good to evaluate your options, the new release of HP-UX 11i v3 has been recognised by Gabriel
Consulting as more available and reliable than AIX. Running on HP Integrity servers, it offers additional flexibility
with a common, modular platform and management for all components – both physical and virtual. In fact, a 2009
Alinean white paper showed that customers who migrated from HP-UX 11i v2 on HP 9000 to HP-UX 11i v3 on HP
Integrity saw a 29% TCO advantage over comparable IBM AIX 6.1 deployments over a 3 year lifecycle.

Oracle/Sun Competitive Attack

“Since migration is so risky, we’re going to look at how Oracle’s strategy could work for our business.”
Moving to HP-UX on Integrity, with the help of HP’s services experts and assessments, will provide a clear and
immediate visibility to address the future of your business technology needs, whilst giving you a range of new
capabilities that will allow you to be more competitive. Whilst Oracle will aim to gain more control over your
environment with aggressive licensing, HP’s highly consolidated and virtualised infrastructure gives you freedom
whilst also lowering TCO.

“I can upgrade to new M-series SPARC Enterprise Servers, so why should I consider the risk and expense of
migrating to HP?”
By switching to HP, you gain a solid roadmap for future upgrades to both hardware and software. HP have a
3-generation Itanium CPU commitment from Intel and an HP-UX 11i roadmap to v5 through 2017. You’ll also gain
the flexibility and scalability that enables you to grow capacity from a single blade to HP Superdome 2 in seconds –
all managed from a single pane of glass. How confident do you really feel about investing in the M-series given its
questionable future roadmap and the future of Solaris under Oracle?

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Convergence is Critical Sales Guide Introduction | 13

IBM Competitive Attack

“If we move our applications away from legacy IBM systems, it will take years to recoup the investment.”
HP recognises that one size does not fit all, which is why they tailor solutions to deliver the ROI that each
organisation requires – something that can be measured in months, not years. HP can deliver reduction in
maintenance, and a 30-50% reduction in development costs.

“We’ve always relied on IBM’s performance for our mission-critical environments and we’ve been told POWER7
systems are even better.”
Are you really prepared to reinvest in a complex, proprietary technology silo, just for a fast processor? HP solutions
can support your entire mission-critical environment, based on a Converged Infrastructure that realigns technology
silos into a common, modular platform that can respond quickly to changing business demands. HP’s Integrity
systems with Blade Scale architecture include best-in-class fault tolerance/resiliency, mission-critical virtualisation
and the performance you need for real-world workloads like Business Intelligence. IBM falls way short of HP when it
comes to the ‘big picture’.

“Moving to HP Integrity will require managing a complex upgrade and recompiling our applications. It introduces a
level unknown that we’re not comfortable with.”
Have you already performed costing, complex upgrades from P4 to P5 to P6, and how to P7? Compare this to HP,
with 3 generations of CPU commitment and a reassuring roadmap for HP-UX. HP’s staggered, calculated releases
of HP-UX 11i v3 minimise transition costs, unlike IBM’s expensive ‘n-minus-one’ support policy. You’ll also be able to
perform in-box upgrades for future Intel Itanium processors without recompiling applications. HP offer a smart,
comprehensive migration to HP Integrity with their IBM Application Modernisation and Migration Services.

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Avnet brings Business Critical Converged
Infrastructure Opportunities into reach

Working in partnership with Avnet Technology Solutions gives you access to the full ecosystem of products and
services that will enable you to deliver a mission-critical Converged Infrastructure for your customers. Our aim is to
make the whole sales process as straightforward and profitable for you as possible – from identifying an opportunity
to scoping the solution and closing the deal.

The information and insight you need to discuss the opportunity
with confidence

This sales guide has been designed to give you an overview of HP’s next generation business critical server
solutions, and how they are helping to deliver the industry’s first mission critical Converged Infrastructure. It will also
help you to identify opportunities within your own customer base – providing an understanding of the business
issues, sales triggers, and any potential objections you may come across – as well as giving you pointers for
engagement and the key benefits to focus on in any given situation. More in-depth information and additional sales
resources are available at www.avnet.com/ts/uk/vendors/hp

The resources that support your sales effort and make the deal happen

Avnet has a dedicated HP team to support your business-critical server/Converged Infrastructure solution sales.
The team comprises specialist sales professionals, extensive pre-sales support and marketing resource – all working
in partnership with HP to support your business. Avnet has a local state of the art warehouse and configuration
facility to enable us to add value to every opportunity. In addition to all of this Avnet has a wide range of
complementary product offerings available to enable Business Partners to gain the competitive advantage of selling
complete Converged Infrastructure solutions to the market place.

Avnet supports you and your business at every point throughout the sales cycle:
■ From basic configurations to architecting complex solutions

■ From simple quotations through to special pricing

■ From sales and technical training/enablement, through to support at customer meetings.

For more information contact the HP team at Avnet on 01706 898398

Marketing initiatives that help you uncover new opportunities
The opportunities for selling mission critical Converged Infrastructure solutions are out there – it’s simply a case of
taking the right messages into your existing customers and making them aware of the solutions you can deliver and
how they can benefit. You also need to find new customers that fit your skills and track-record. Avnet can help you
make contact with these key audiences, with access to our specialist, dedicated HP marketing team and our online
marketing campaign generation tool – campaignWORKS.

For more information contact the HP marketing team at Avnet on 01706 222180

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Avnet Technology Solutions’
Products and Solutions

As a leading distributor of computing technologies and services, Avnet Technology Solutions connects its partners
to more customers and more solutions. Our comprehensive suite of services and established partnerships with
leading technology providers, ensures that you have the right combination of resources to capture new revenue
generating opportunities.

■   Computer Components
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■   Virtualisation
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For more information on HP solutions from Avnet
please contact:
HP Team
T: 01706 898398
W: http://www.avnet.com/ts/uk/vendors/hp/

Avnet Technology Solutions Ltd.
5 The Sterling Centre
Eastern Road
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RG12 2PW, UK
T +44 (0)1344 662000
F +44 (0)1344 662141
ats.uk@avnet.com

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