Last week was really interesting for me, since it had been some time since my last international talk. Currently I’m involved in presenting (parts of) the “HPE Cloud Roadshow”, organized to explain the offering surrounding the brand-new “HPE HC250 for Microsoft CPS Standard”
In their London (Bracknell) office, HPE UK received the first model to leave the factory the evening before our presentation and had that on display throughout the day.
Although our hands were itching to get “hands-on”, we were able to restrain ourselves.
So what’s the Azureman doing with some on-premises Hyper-converged device? Well, the beauty of this device, for starters, is that it provides a fully automated setup of Windows Azure Pack and does so within four hours. That’s the Azure cloud in your own datacenter! This installation is done after providing some basic information about your environment and licenses.
After installation, a single enclosure configuration is ready to host somewhere between 100-400 Virtual Machines (depending on the size of the VM’s and the acquired configuration of the HPE HC250). The solution can scale up to a maximum of 4 enclosures with 4 nodes each. At that moment the maxed-out (!!) configuration will have about 8TB of memory to assign to the virtual machines its hosting and 22TB of hybrid (SAS/SSD) storage.
But the real great thing is, since the device is part of the CPS offering from Microsoft, that customers can choose to complement the device with services from the public Azure cloud. During the one day Roadshow event we’ll mainly focus on the device and the on-premises services (Windows Azure Pack) on top of the (hyper-)converged hardware, but we’ll also touch backup with DPM / Azure Backup and using Azure Site Recovery to provide Disaster Recovery services.
In the coming months the team and myself will travel all over the EMEA region to get the word out and get even more people into the Azure cloud. More information about the HP HC250 can be obtained by reading the product sheet.
If any questions popped up during reading this blog, leave a comment below, or drop me an email!
Bert Wolters.
http://www.twitter.com/BertWolters
Thanks to Sander Berkouwer for the quick spell-check!
