HP Converged Infrastructure and Avnet: A Whole Host of Benefits

In the IT space, servers and storage are as natural a pair as peanut butter and jelly. And as computes become bigger, thanks to Big Data and analytics, having servers and storage in a converged infrastructure can make a lot of sense.

That’s the idea behind Hewlett-Packard’s (HPQ) converged infrastructure technology, which brings together technologies into solutions that need specific needs. Avnet (AVT) Technology Solutions (ATS) has been named the go-to distributor for HP’s converged infrastructure technology, giving channel partners a route to offer their customers best-of-breed, need-specific technologies.

Alison Challman, director of Marketing and Brand Solutions for the HP Solutions Group at ATS, notes the converged infrastructure idea is about efficiency. “The bundled nature of a converged infrastructure is really about how that technology can be deployed for a specific use, whether it’s general use compute, or … to support an application like [HP] Vertica or Big Data analytics,” she said.

In this FastChat video, Challman discusses how channel partners can use converged infrastructure not just to answer customer-specific needs, but also as a stepping stone for data center agility or as part of their journey to the cloud.

“If you have a customer who’s in the more advanced stages of having a virtualized server environment and dealing with some of the complexities of virtual server sprawl, then converged solutions can be a stepping stone in gaining some IT efficiencies,” she said. “Even a customer who is mainly looking to put in infrastructure today that ultimately will support an environment tomorrow that is more a shared infrastructure or cloud-enabled infrastructure, converged solutions can be a stepping stone to supporting that goal.”

Avnet and HP have partnered to bring to market six preconfigured, validated solutions based on HP BladeSystem, 3PAR storage and HP networking technology, designed to work in small, midsize and large virtualization environments, Challman said.

To support the technology, “Avnet has made tremendous investment in our HP business to really help our partners,” she said. “Chief among that investment has been in our pre-sales and post-sales technical expertise. We have more than 100 technical consultants/solution architects who are working hand in hand with our partners to sell and deliver HP’s converged solutions and help customers realize the value of what HP brings through converged solutions.”