Server hardware white papers

In an effort to meet the growth challenges associated with global expansion and distributed business environments, IT organizations are embracing server and storage virtualization to support business strategies that are more fluid, more cost-effective, and better able to support a dynamic workforce. As they do so, however, many organizations are finding that a more holistic data center virtualization strategy is necessary to meet the management, scalability, and reliability issues related to virtualization deployments.

The centralisation of applications and access using thin clients enhances manageability and security. However, while desktop virtualisation usually has little or no impact on the end-user experience when the thin client and server communicate over a LAN, it can come at the cost of reduced user experience when running over the wide area network (WAN), in particular in high-latency environments.

Employees installing and using legitimate but unauthorised applications, such as Instant Messaging, VoIP, games, virtualisation software, and unapproved browsers are a real and growing threat to business security and productivity. Removable storage media and wireless protocols make the challenge of securing data even more complex.

Organisations of all sizes are struggling to meet the conflicting challenges associated with macro-level global financial uncertainty and micro-level information storage growth and complexity. A growing number of IT managers are turning to virtualisation and consolidation technologies to meet these challenges. With a focus on scalability, automated management using rich software tools, all-inclusive pricing, and an architecture that leverages the economic advantages of Ethernet and industry standard technologies, Dell‟s EqualLogic storage family is an excellent example of a solution that was purpose-built to address these issues.

A decade ago, our biggest IT concerns were such things as processor frequency, memory and storage capacity and network bandwidth. Today we're more concerned with improving productivity through virtualisation, optimisation, energy stewardship, and flexible sourcing. We need to provide high availability and quality of existing services, but also meet customer expectations for real-time, dynamic access to innovative new services.

The National Paints' factory in Sharjah, UAE has the latest, fully computerized paint manufacturing machines that have a 24/7, high-volume production schedule during which it needs secure access to the company's formulas and related data required for its production every minute. The old system was based on cluster and while it provided high availability, it needed dedicated resource, and an increased level of support to run applications in order to keep the system running. It selected NEC Computers' Fault Tolerant Server NEC Express5800/320FT to enable its computerised paint manufacturing machines to access its systems 24/7 while reducing total cost of ownership.

Repsol is an international integrated oil and gas company operating in over 30 countries. Its IT department provides infrastructure and support to more than 200 sites, 2,000 petrol stations and 30,000 employees - all using different applications and tools. The company decided to roll out a virtual server infrastructure in the data centre to make it easier to maintain a controlled and homogeneous server environment, reducing the time it takes to allocate server resources to support new projects, and lowering the total cost of ownership of the IT infrastructure.

Citrix XenApp farms are often maintained on physical servers instead of virtual machines. Testing by Tolly shows that Citrix XenServer, which includes specific optimisations for XenApp, highlights the performance improvements that customers can obtain when choosing XenServer over a VMware Virtual Infrastructure in their XenApp Virtual Server farms.

This white paper accents the HP Adaptive Infrastructure, within which Citrix Application Delivery solutions can be used to create an integral part of the IT supply chain, and HP Server Based Computing. Information is provided on the features and scalability of HP ProLiant servers for Citrix Application Delivery environments.

This document lists all of the printers tested by HP in XenApp environments, explains the printer and scan tests performed by Citrix, identifies which HP printers, printer driver versions, scanners, all-in-one printers and TWAIN driver versions were used, and describes any issues that occurred while performing these tests.