WWT, HPE and Intel Maximize CapEx/OpEx Server Benefits

Ideally, a well-planned technology solution should meet a company's performance, operational and business goals, and provide maximum financial gains — balancing and lowering capital expenditures (CapEx) and operating expenses (OpEx) to maximize return on investment (ROI) and minimize total cost of ownership (TCO). But, all too often, some organizations make IT purchases to address an immediate need, and minimizing CapEx is the only consideration. They end up addressing only part of their overall objective, providing gains for either CapEx ("We need more cost-effective compute") or OpEx ("We need a better way to manage systems") — but not both. Instead these objectives are commonly addressed in their own separate vacuums — when in fact the two are related and intertwined.

Take the example of a bargain-minded company that invests in a certain open compute product, only to realize later that it lacks key features necessary to manage the infrastructure. Soon the company starts to fall out of service-level compliance with customers, experiences costly downtime from outages, and even becomes vulnerable to security threats. Result: the OpEx required to repair these proliferating problems totals more than three times the "savings" from this ill-advised CapEx decision.

This scenario illustrates why WWT leverages its longstanding technology partnerships with HPE and Intel to deliver optimized solutions that go beyond the standard metrics of performance, reliability, security and so forth. A compute solution from HPE utilizing Intel® technologies is a choice way to optimize both CapEx and OpEx expenditures — and enable customers to achieve gains in TCO and ROI as well.

Benefits of a combined partnership: WWT, HPE and Intel

Each partner brings a unique value-add to our shared solutions:

• HPE produces a wide array of server systems that are integrated with Intel technology, spanning processors, persistent memory, storage solutions, and accelerators. For more than a quarter-century, HPE and Intel have collaborated to deliver innovative technology solutions that advance and transform their customers' data center infrastructure.
• The Intel technology innovations that reside in HPE data center hardware bring the joint solution to life, introducing flexibility, scalability and simplicity to the modern data center.
• Finally, add to this collaboration WWT's integration expertise, as well as unparalleled testing and validation capabilities in the Advanced Technology Center (ATC). The result: joint solutions that enable customers to reap the full benefits of a strategic and optimized OpEx/CapEx approach that will maximize ROI and reduce TCO.

Together, WWT, HPE and Intel work to prove: data center solutions really can benefit from a judicious combination of CapEx/OpEx resources to yield the most effective overall ROI and TCO.

Achieving CapEx benefits from improved performance

CapEx — the investment in physical assets such as data center hardware, personal computing devices and so forth — gives you exclusive ownership of dedicated resources designed to enhance your operation. In the case of leading-edge data center solutions from WWT, HPE and Intel, those new resources can optimize, or actually reduce, capital expenditures by requiring fewer servers to deliver greater performance.

Intel works closely with HPE to integrate and optimize its hardware offerings with the latest Intel technologies for today's most demanding data center workloads, including:

• 2nd generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors which are purpose-built to drive data center transformation in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics. This next-gen processor features an advanced compute core for rapid, actionable insights and improved machine learning (ML).
• Intel® Optane™ persistent memory significantly advances in-memory technology by combining large capacity with support for data persistence. Intel PMem, as it's known, leverages the most useful attributes of robust performance, prodigious memory capacity and rapid-access storage.
• Intel® Optane™ SSDs for the data center occupy their own never-before-seen tier — the storage/memory hierarchy. These SSDs combine the most useful qualities of memory and storage to reduce bottlenecks and provide low latency, high throughput, greater endurance and improved quality of service.

These Intel technologies, combined with HPE architecture and WWT deployment expertise, combine to create scalable, power-efficient, converged data center environments that conserve resources while delivering superior performance to meet today's most demanding workloads.

Adding OpEx benefits from simplified IT management

OpEx payments are the day-to-day financial outlays that keep the organization running: rents and leases, utilities, payroll, services and so forth. For IT, a critical OpEx consideration involves IT management.

HPE architecture innovations are designed to help conserve OpEx through technologies that simplify, streamline and automate IT management, so personnel spend less time performing routine updates and are free to focus on more high-level considerations. Those technologies include:

• HPE Silicon Root of Trust — Certain nefarious malware attacks can burrow deep into a system, compromising its integrity as it reports back a "normal" state – all the while extracting data, performing corporate espionage, or even mounting an outright attack. HPE Silicon Root of Trust establishes a digital footprint in the silicon — a "root of trust" — so IT systems can automatically check firmware levels to confirm that the infrastructure is secure. If a security breach is detected, the system will instantly alert IT that it has mitigated the incident by rolling back to the last known safe state. In this way, IT staff can focus on optimizing security to foil further intrusions. HPE Silicon Root of Trust helps safeguard against firmware attacks, detects previously elusive compromised firmware or malware, and works to rapidly recover the server in case of an attack. Only trusted firmware can be loaded onto the server, rapidly frustrating firmware attacks.
• HPE InfoSight — This predictive analytics platform for the data center uses software-defined intelligence to anticipate and prevent infrastructure issues before they occur while keeping the environment operational, fast and agile. Gathering information from all HPE platforms into one location, the high-visibility InfoSight platform easily predicts problems — whereas without it, customers would have to personally observe every server site to draw the conclusions that InfoSight makes in an instant. Predictive analytics frees IT to focus on business outcomes as it standardizes IT operations across servers, clusters and continents.
• HPE OneView — This infrastructure management software is the platform that bridges the connection from core to cloud: OneView automates IT operations and simplifies infrastructure lifecycle management across compute, storage and networking. It can be integrated into the VMware vCenter instance, providing a single pane of glass for the infrastructure. As an open API, OneView can provide visibility into a range of factors as it allows you to deploy infrastructure, firmware and drivers.

Through automation and intelligence, all these integrated capabilities serve to advance the next-gen data center beyond the need for human involvement in monitoring, updating, reporting and other routine tasks — and doing so with greater reliability — conserving OpEx and CapEx.

It all comes together with WWT in the ATC

Building and deploying the right HPE infrastructure solution based on Intel technology for the next-gen data center — one that maximizes the benefits from both CapEx and OpEx to deliver optimum TCO and ROI — is where WWT's expertise comes into play. WWT's thought leadership and integration experience are on prominent display in its Advanced Technology Center. It is here, through rigorous testing, labs and validation, that you can appreciate the benefits of our longtime collaborative relationships.

WWT, HPE and Intel take data center technology beyond standard performance metrics with a holistic approach that optimizes all the elements of a healthy IT environment and the organization it serves — taking into account the best possible return on investment, cost of ownership, and the CapEx/OpEx decisions that impact them. With all these elements in place, businesses are free to refocus their energies on the next big opportunity provided by their jointly created data center solution.

You can learn more about WWT's approach to the current server landscape in this Server Infrastructure Briefing; acquaint yourself with server terminology, trends and solutions by attending a WWT Server Infrastructure Workshop.