By Mark Davison at Discover 2013, Barcelona – As the ominous and instantly recognisable cello strains from movie classic Jaws echoed through speakers, HP today unveiled the latest additions to its ConvergedSystem portfolio – ConvergedSystem 700 for Virtualisation, ConvergedSystem 300 for Vertica and the Moonshot-based ConvergedSystem 100 for Hosted Desktops.
Tom Joyce, senior vice-president and GM of HP Converged Systems, explained to assembled journalists that the reason for the Jaws theme in the introduction of the new systems was that during development, the new systems went under the moniker of “Project Sharks”.
“Why sharks?” he asks. “When I was a kid I was fascinated by sharks and what they are designed to do. The shark is an extremely sophisticated hunting machine designed to do one thing and to do it extremely well. That is how we have designed these new systems.
“The HP shark is in the water – and if I was VCE, I’d get out,” Joyce quips.
He says that ConvergedSystem 700 for Virtualisation will help clients easily scale computing resources to meet their business needs with preconfigured, modular virtualisation systems supporting 50 to 1 000 virtual machines at twice the performance and at an entry price 25% lower than competitive offerings.
ConvergedSystem 300 for Vertica speeds big data analytics, helping organisations turn data into actionable insights at 50 to 1 000 times faster performance and 70% lower cost per terabyte than legacy data warehouses.
Joyce says that with ConvergedSystem 100 for Hosted Desktops, HAVEn (Hadoop, Autonomy, Vertica, Enterprise and nApp) technology is now available within the portfolio. It is also the first system packaged around HP’s Moonshot.
“This first PC on a chip for the data centre delivers six times faster graphics performance and 44% lower total cost of ownership than competitive systems,” he says.
The new systems also come with a unified support model from HP Proactive Care, providing clients with a single point of accountability for all system components, including partner software. HP also offers consulting capabilities to plan, design and integrate HP ConvergedSystem offerings into broader cloud, big data and virtualisation solutions, while mapping physical and virtual workloads on to clients’ new HP ConvergedSystem.