HPE JC150B Getting Started Guide

Case study

HP future-proofs data centers
with best-in-class equipment

Tech giant demonstrates reliability of own

networkingproducts

Industry

Information technology

“Every dollar of HP’s multi-billion

Objective

Build a feature-rich data center infrastructure

that is energy- and cost-ecient, delivers
high-performance throughput, and oers

unparalleled security

Approach

Review proposals from top networking vendors

and conduct proof-of-concept tests to determine
the best supplier. Assemble a cross-departmental

installation and implementation team, implement
sta training, and develop a meticulous transition
plan to avoid downtime during upgrades

IT matters

• Transitioned over 280 servers with live
applications to the infrastructure with no
application service interruption

• Increased support for 10 Gb/s attached servers
toallow for higher levels of network trac

• Reduced time to deploy new applications by
50percent on average, saving IT sta time

• Removed proprietary protocols in favor of open
standards, to avoid vendor lock-in

• Gained scalability of network capacity and security,
a key enabler for growth

Business matters

• Supports more than 120 Gb/s of Internet trac,
which oers faster internal communications and a

better user experience for shopping at hp.com

• Signicantly reduces infrastructure investment,

maintenance, support, and overall total cost
ofownership

• Improves security and boosts PCI compliance by
adding intrusion prevention

dollar revenue stream and all core
applications supporting over

300,000employees run through

HPNetworking equipment.

Ourexperience shows that

HPNetworking meets best-in­classperformance, scalability,
andreliability requirements of

thelargest enterprises.”

– John Lino, distinguished technologist and HP IT Chief

NetworkArchitect

New technologies drive change

It’s no surprise when a high-tech company uses its own

products. However, the story of how HP migrated its network

from Cisco to HP Networking equipment has unique aspects

that make it relevant to all enterprises in any industry or

market segment. In 2010, HP found that its network

infrastructure wasn’t poised to take advantage of recent data
center advances—such as virtualization, green technology,

additional layers of security, and higher density server
connectivity. It was time for the company to embrace open

standards and evolve along with network technology.

Case study | H P future-proof s data centers with
best-in-class equipment

With revenues in excess of $100 billion
USD and vemajor business lines, HP has
a portfolio that spans servers, storage,
networking, personal computing, imaging
&printing, software, services, and solutions.
Employing more than 300,000 people
in 170 countries, HP is also one of the
largest providers of information technology
infrastructure, software, services, and
solutions in the world.

Driven by innovation

Given that scale, it stands to reason that
HP places a high level of importance on its
infrastructure, and the company tries to
ensure that the infrastructure; is kept up to
date through an evergreen strategy of regular
upgrades and continuous improvement. To
that end, thecompany consolidated more
than 85 of its data centers and hundreds of
small server sites into six new global facilities
located in the United States. The HP Global
IT department built out the network, using
products from HP and other vendors.

From the time the data center consolidation

was completed, much had changed as
advances in virtualization and the demand
for higher density of 10-Gigabit server
connectivity drove requirements for higher
network throughput. Green technology had
matured, oering potentialcost savings; and
the increase of targeted attacks dictated
a need for additional layersof security. In
order to meet these new challenges, Global IT
launched a network transformation initiative.

Every aspect of HP drives innovation; and
HP ITis no exception to that rule. Taking a

portfolio of technologies focused around

HP networking assets, HP IT’s Network
Architecture and Engineering team developed

a purpose-built and industry-leading
architecture and technology strategy that

enabled seamless transformation to new,
ecient, and feature-rich infrastructure and
services—without compromising production
uptime in the next-generation IT datacenters.

Finding the best supplier

HP-owned Cisco-based legacy infrastructure
couldn’t oer the exibility or scalability the
design team was looking for. The rst key
step in the transformation was selecting
a new vendor for routers, switches, and
other network components. To best meet

the goals of the transformation, the team

chose products that relied on open standards

and increased exibility—and could easily
be replaced as technology evolves and
could support an increasingly converged
infrastructure with no vendor lock-in. Other
factors taken into consideration included
energy eciency andintrusion detection
andprevention.

“ The existing Cisco-based

network couldn’t meet our
requirements without a
massive re-architecture, major
rip-and-replace operation, and

further digression into

proprietary platforms and
protocols.”

– John Lino, distinguished technologist and HP IT

Chief Network Architect

Company leadership made it clear that the
HPIT had the exibility to choose the best
vendor to t the business needs.

“There were many factors that inuenced
our decision,” says John Lino, distinguished
technologist and Chief Network Architect,
HPIT. “But open standards ranked near the
top, because it allowed us tobuild solutions
based on the products andservices that best
met our requirements, instead of being locked
into a proprietarytechnology.”

HPIT considered proposals from top
networking companies such as Juniper,
Foundry, and Brocade, as well as
HPNetworking. The team researched
specications, ran extensive proof-of-concept
tests, and met with other IT professionals
before selecting HP Networking.

HP Networking is committed to open

standards and builds products that are simple

to adopt into existing architectures, while also

providing benets within those architectures.
The group also oers a streamlined and
consistent portfolio of technologies which,
combined with a single source for maintenance
and support, helped to bring eciencies to

network operations.

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