HP

Introduction

Virtually every organisation understands that its successful operation depends on the continuous availability of its applications. Most companies rely on internal applications – ranging from enterprise resource planning to payroll systems – to keep the wheels of their enterprise turning. They also depend on external-facing applications for everything from selling products to their customers to automating the supply chain with suppliers and partners. The failure of any of these mission-critical applications could be catastrophic to a business.

The causes of downtime are numerous. Top-of-mind causes include fire and natural disasters such as floods, tornadoes and hurricanes. More unexpected are causes such as power and cooling failures. But even more unforeseen are the failures that are not
thought of as true disasters: A fire in another part of the building can cause smoke and water damage in the best-protected data centre. Human errors such as the faulty configuration of a switch or accidental discharge of fire-suppression material can also cause downtime. When a failure occurs, its scope can range from a system to a rack, from a room to a floor, and from a building to an entire site. continue reading...

From the moment you turn on your workstations in the morning, what are you trying to do? What’s a “winning day?”
Is it designing a better component—getting a healthy pat on the back for ingenuity? Or cleverly finding an extra .01%
margin in a series of stock trades, yielding a sizeable commission? Maybe it’s polishing up the last 20 seconds of
video in an awesome ad campaign, putting a huge smile on the client’s face?

These objectives can be met (and you can have a winning day)—it just takes the right tools. For most engineers/
designers/financial analysts/artists, the desktop personal workstation is the primary tool that can help make a day
successful. That winning day largely depends on leveraging the innovation displayed by the workstation vendor—in
effect, you’re looking for a good ROI (Return on Innovation).

HP’s new HP Z Workstations takes performance and reliability to the next level in nearly every aspect of workstation
design. Depending upon how the workstation and its applications are used, technological innovations in the following
areas will directly improve productivity. continue reading...

Choosing hardware and software for a workstation is often a no-brainer—you know what you need before you even start looking at platforms. What if you could pick and
choose your components based not only on your individual requirements, but also on the assurance that they would be available for the lifecycle of your HP Workstation? Now, with HP Stable & Consistent Offerings, you can. Choose from a range of options that will be available as long as your HP Workstation, including:

• Processors
• Graphics cards
• Hard drives
• Optical drives
• Memory
• Operating systems
• Peripherals

Sound amazing? It is. That’s HP.

Imagine measuring refresh cycles in years instead of months. HP Stable & Consistent Offerings allow HP Workstation customers such as OEMs and large enterprises to simplify their certification and support burdens and streamline large deployments with configurations that are long-term future-ready right out of the box. This stability is also a bonus for resellers and channel partners who want to meet the specialized platform stability requirements of their large volume customers and help them minimize the disruptions associated with repeatedly qualifying new configurations. continue reading...

Executive summary
Are you using multiple Ethernet and Fibre Channel connections and wires to manage the network and storage traffic in your operating environment? Then you are likely concerned about Ethernet and Fibre Channel sprawl and associated management and maintenance costs. Having diverse networks adds to the workload of day-to-day operations. As market dynamics change, the way you operate your business also needs to change. It may be time for you to consider lossless 10 GbE Ethernet 1 and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) technology as building blocks toward a converged network.

Convergence is the fundamental way to operate technology and business today—at a lower total cost of operation (TCO), and with a higher return on investment (ROI). It allows you to simplify your infrastructure by pooling your compute, storage, and server resources via virtualization technologies.

HP delivers market-leading Converged Infrastructure products and solutions. Our proven blade servers and enclosures can help you reduce 77 percent of your data center footprint2 by moving from rack mount to blade server platforms. With Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE)/FCoE networking technology, you reduce the number of host bust adapters, switches, and cabling

in the data center—enabling greater savings. FCoE is a new protocol that enables Fibre Channel traffic to be run in an Ethernet network. FCoE combines two leading technologies: the Fibre Channel protocol, which is the predominant storage area network (SAN) technology; and Ethernet, which is supported in all servers and data centers to provide more options to users for FC SAN connectivity and networking. continue reading...

In today’s information age, protecting critical data of an organization’s branch offices, across multiple locations, should be standard practice. However, delivering a robust data protection strategy in environments with limited resources and often untrained personnel, can prove challenging. IDC quantified the size of this challenge: one-fifth of large companies have over 50% of their data in remote offices1, and another one-third of large companies have 20-50% of data in their remote offices. Very often, business-critical data at remote or branch office (ROBO) locations is inadequately protected, exposing the business to greater risk of lost data and lost productivity.

Introduction
A study conducted by industry analyst Enterprise Strategy Group found that the top three IT priorities for remote office / branch office (ROBO) locations were driven by business priorities: to improve information security, ensure regulatory compliance, and enhance disaster recovery2. However, the many choices in data protection technologies and approaches, coupled with a wide range of vendors to choose from, can make data protection planning a daunting endeavor.

This white paper drills deeper into these challenges and the considerations for a better way to approach data protection. It also explains how the HP data protection portfolio can help businesses overcome their data protection challenges, and drive better business outcomes. The white paper includes a glossary, defining terms used to expand data protection approaches, and where customers can find further information on HP data protection offerings. continue reading...

Overview continue reading...

Executive summary

Rather than spending IT dollars on infrastructure and overheads, today’s businesses need their IT dollars to go toward delivering new applications to help them to be more competitive in the business they're in, help them enter new businesses, and to support business transformation. Businesses everywhere are counting on IT to deliver more value to their business. HP believes that IT has the resources to do it. The problem is, because of the sprawl of data and systems, those resources are tangled up in the overheads of legacy architectures and inflexible stacks of IT.

Data explosion is a primary contributor to IT sprawl, inefficiency, and waste. The data growth challenge is particularly acute when looking at how much time and money customers spend in managing data protection processes and the ever growing mountain of archival and offline data. The digital data universe grew to 800 billion gigabytes in 2009, an increase of 62 percent from the 2008 figures, and it doesn’t stop there; the digital data universe is expected to grow by 44 times between 2010 and 2020.1 It’s no surprise then, that a 2010 Storage Priorities Survey. Data deduplication has emerged as one of the fastest growing datacenter technologies in recent years. With the ability to decrease redundancy and so retain typically 20x more data on disk, it continues to attract tremendous interest in response to data growth. However, implementations of first generations of deduplication technology have become extremely complex, with numerous point solutions, rigid solution stacks, scalability limitations, and fragmented heterogeneous approaches. This complexity results in increased risk, extra cost, and management overhead. reported that Enterprise storage managers list two of their three top storage priorities to be related to data protection; namely data backup and disaster recovery. Data deduplication continues to be the likeliest new technology to be added to backup operations, with 61 percent of customers in the storage priorities survey either deploying or evaluating it, and that’s on top of the 23 percent of current deduplication users.

Data deduplication has emerged as one of the fastest growing datacenter technologies in recent years. With the ability to decrease redundancy and so retain typically 20x more data on disk, it continues to attract tremendous interest in response to data growth. However, implementations of first generations of deduplication technology have become extremely complex, with numerous point solutions, rigid solution stacks, scalability limitations, and fragmented heterogeneous approaches. This complexity results in increased risk, extra cost, and management overhead.

This whitepaper introduces and describes StoreOnce software, next-generation deduplication technology from HP that allows for better management, higher performance, and more efficient data protection, while providing IT administrators with a cost-effective way to control unrelenting data growth. continue reading...

Introduction

HP is committed to supporting our customer’s operating system needs. As new operating systems and service packs are introduced, HP engineering teams perform testing to verify compatibility on HP products.This allows our customers to pick the operating system and service pack which best suits their computing environment.

This white paper discusses installing Windows 7 on selected HP products. The document provides basic instructions for the installation process. The information contained in this white paper is current as of the date of publication. It is recommended that you refer to http://www.hp.com/support for the most current files.

These instructions are provided as a courtesy for customers upgrading to Windows 7.

If you need help using a Microsof®t Windows® 7 DVD that was not obtained through the Windows 7 Upgrade Option Program from HP, contact Microsoft: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/help Microsoft supports the Windows 7 software under Microsoft warranty terms. However, HP continues to support your PC hardware under the terms of your PC's limited warranty.

If you received a Windows 7 Upgrade DVD through the Windows 7 Upgrade Option Program from HP and you need assistance beyond these instructions, please contact HP by visiting www.hp.com/go/contacthp.

HP recommends that you back up all user data and burn or locate your system recovery disks before beginning any upgrade or re-installation.

List of Tested Systems

The following HP Personal Workstations are supported for upgrade to Windows 7.

Personal Workstations

HP Z400 Workstation

HP Z600 Workstation

HP Z800 Workstation

HP xw4600 Workstation

HP xw6600 Workstation

HP xw8600 Workstation

HP xw9400 Workstation continue reading...

IDC OPINION
After the global economic and geopolitical turmoil of the past two and a half years, increased regulatory oversight is expected to become the norm. Organizations therefore need to be cognizant of their obligations and execute plans to manage information consistent with the records management, data retention, and data protection requirements across the countries in which they operate. Corporate written policies should address local requirements, keeping in mind that data protection implies obligations to (1) enforce the smart deletion of data and convenience copies as well as (2) prevent the destruction of critical business records due to legal and regulatory mandates. Written policies should also anticipate and plan for potential cross-border data transfer issues that may arise from these data protection and data retention (legal and regulatory) obligations.

Organizations should also have technical protocols in place to enforce these written policies. Operational service-level and cost objectives also demand that organizations seek ways to realize leverage and to have the ability to enforce policies consistently across multiple media and application types.

Adopting a global records management, data retention, and data protection framework and employing technology to enforce these policies into technical protocols will provide cost efficiencies and risk mitigation benefits.

IN THIS WHITE PAPER
This IDC White Paper discusses the impact of the critical records management, data retention, and data protection regulations across key geographies (namely, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Australia). It concludes with recommendations for developing global information governance best practices. Readers should note that providing legal and regulatory information is not legal advice. IDC does not provide legal advice. Readers should consult with their legal counsel experts accordingly. continue reading...