Server Capacity As Needed For Cost-Effective High Availability
The most streamlined companies in business today are not just setting the pace for the market, they’re using technology to better position themselves for growth opportunities. Everything is about immediate results, better collaborations, and instant access to information, products, and services. In other words, customers want it now, and the businesses that can deliver fastest win the race.
To meet these demands, successful enterprises must do more than create efficient business models. You need to accelerate the shift to technology-enabled services that clearly deliver business outcomes. You are looking beyond technology platforms to how technology is applied so it delivers tangible results.
One focus of this shift is finding the right balance for investing IT budget—avoiding overbuilt or underused resources while matching technology cost to business needs. You want to increase server availability, improve data protection, and enhance flexibility. Your servers must be easier to manage, more agile and responsive to changes in the marketplace, and operate at peak efficiency. And to tie this investment to tangible business outcomes, managing reliable metrics is essential.
Server Environment Options Help Avoid Over-Provisioning
One innovative approach to this challenge is HP Instant Capacity (iCAP). This arrangement of hardware, software, and services allows you to deploy a fully-loaded server, yet only pay for the components you plan to use on day one. The remaining cores, memory, and cell board capacity are held in reserve for a fraction of the installation cost, available to activate when you need them.
“It’s like overdraft protection for your server capacity,” said Rob Taylor, VP of HP Enterprise Services, Data Center Services one HP expert. “It’s not a utility model, which is metered based on planned, but fluctuating, usage. This is a reserve of space for unexpected or unusual capacity needs. HP manages the complete server environment for you, using the dynamic ability of iCAP to move and add server capabilities as required.”
HP iCAP technology and services provide affordable ways to grow server capacity. You avoid over-provisioning a system by right-sizing from the beginning, and you can manage growth and peaks without downtime. iCAP allows for better workload management tailored to your specific business.
Instant Capacity Alternatives For Different Demands
Because enterprise needs can vary by industry and opportunity, HP provides several different options within the iCAP program. These give your organization choices that best fit your specific server capacity requirements:
- Instant Capacity (iCAP)—This helps with a rapid demand increase that has an unpredictable duration. Demand may increase to meet regulatory compliance, accumulating datasets (storage), or new market growth (example: a new product launch).
- Temporary Instant Capacity (TiCAP)—Demand is more expected, but temporary, and has a set end date. You pre-purchase processing time which can be used to turn cores on and off as needed to meet planned increases in demand (for example, an increase in online shopping around Christmastime).
- Global Instant Capacity (GiCAP)—Allows customers to share Instant Capacity usage rights among a group of servers, enabling more cost-effective high availability, more efficient use of data center resources, and more flexibility in resource utilization (example: transferring usage rights from a downed server or failed partition). This also enables simple and cost-effective disaster recovery plans by automatically and dynamically moving server capacity to available servers during an outage.
Through all three of these approaches, our automatic and policy-based load balancing and high availability lower business risk. And our pricing model enables benefits to be achieved at lower cost than a traditional procurement model.
Resource Management Benefits In a Cost-Saving Model
HP Enterprise Services provides the daily operational tasks of systems management, monitoring, hosting, and ongoing support for iCAP-enabled servers as optional features within HP Server Management Services—an offering within HP Data Center Services. With these iCAP service options, you gain cohesive integration of your server environment, either hosted in your data center or from one of many HP world-class facilities. Additional benefits include:
- Lower business risk with automatic and policy-based resource management
- Deferment of most hardware costs and all software and support costs until the resources are needed
- Immediate access to more capacity
- Capability to load balance partitions and dynamically move iCAP cores within a server
- Greater flexibility to manage growth and peaks without downtime
- Accommodation of predictable or planned capacity demands
- Resource management capabilities to distribute capacity when and where you need it
HP iCAP is a minor addition that can make a major difference in your operations, especially as IT becomes more mission-critical. Our services help you manage your workload without overextending your budget or taking unnecessary risks. And you’re focusing IT investments to deliver the results you need. It’s a small but significant step in using technology for better business outcomes, now and in the future.
More Information
Download the Instant Capacity Fact Sheet
