Contact your local HP expert from XMA in:

Scotland:0141 587 2375 Reading:0118 912 6400 Nottingham:0115 846 4999 Wales:0845 437 4132

As a 2011 Gold Unified Networking Specialist XMA can provide a HP Instant-On networking solution designed to meet the needs of your school or education environment at an unbeatable price. Improve your storage

Making the move to a more virtualised networking environment? Or just out grown your current data storage XMA have the latest HP storage range. Industry Standard Servers

HP Integrity servers create agile infrastructure for an Adaptive Enterprise, where Education and IT are synchronised. Relax With HP Critical Advantage Service

Relax With HP Critical Advantage Service

HP Critical Advantage (CA) Service is a comprehensive support solution designed to help you maximise your return on investment and proactively protects your infrastructure.

Need a higher level of support?

The HP Blade System Health Check provides the minimum level of preventative service for Blades.

If your x86 blade environment is important to your business, if you require a greater level of ongoing proactive support and assistance, if you need greater reliability then Critical Advantage is the service for you.

If your blade environment is critical to your business and if any unplanned downtime has a major impact on your business then Critical Service is the service for you. Critical Service provides a comprehensive ongoing proactive and preventative support solution which dramatically increases availability.

Is Your HP Blade System Healthy?

20%

Only 20% of downtime results from hardware failure such as a broken processor or a failed disc.

The remaining 80% of unplanned downtime is caused by problems managing the environment or oversights. This means that the majority of downtime is ultimately preventable.

Common causes of downtime in Blade environments are:

Out of date software, drivers, BIOS, patches and fi rmware
Software compatibility issues
Suboptimal configurations & confi guration issues
Service management & procedural issues

HPs Blade System Health Check has been designed specifi cally for blade environments to help to address some of the common issues that cause the 80% of problems that are preventable, giving you greater reliability.

More and more companies are purchasing Blades as a means of increasing asset utilisation and leveraging the cost advantages that owning fewer assets brings.

Significant downtime in blade environments is caused by the added complexity that the blades & virtualisation bring. Moving to a Bladed environment brings with it a new set of challenges for IT departments as the technology contained within the chassis is highly interdependent. Changing one parameter within a Blade enclosure can have unforeseen consequences in another. There are in excess of 40 fi rmware, software and microprograms in a Blade enclosure which all need to be compatible with each other. Changing one often requires analysis of the impact on all the others. Therefore, things like upgrades and replacing parts requires thorough planning and testing following a disciplined process.

Typical examples of blade systems failure that are preventable include:

Media company – implemented a firmware upgrade without considering the interdependencies. This led to a mismatch of fi rmware levels, causing 70 blade servers to become intermittently unavailable and affecting call centre operations at peak time.

Financial company – a blade server failed and was replaced with a spare by the customer. The customer did not have a firmware/driver update policy and the replacement blade was at a higher revision of firmware and was therefore incompatible with the existing infrastructure. This led to a severely degraded service whilst updates were retrospectively implemented to allow the blade infrastructure to work properly.

Firmware and Patches

Are you sure that your Blade System is running all current versions of firmware? Do you find it difficult to determine the most appropriate revisions for your specific environment?

HP estimates that approximately 30% of all unplanned downtime in Blade Systems environments is caused either directly or indirectly by out of date patches and firmware. Therefore things like the apparently straightforward matter of swapping one Blade for another can lead to reduced performance or an outage. Replacements parts often have the latest fi rmware installed which may be incompatible with the firmware within the existing enclosure. What seems like a routine replacement or upgrade can have a major impact on system performance, application availability and the smooth running of your business systems. Rectifying outages caused by incompatibility can also be very time consuming, compounding the problem.

HP Blade System Health Check

HP’s Blade Health Check service has been designed to:

Assist you to identify your current firmware and driver revisions and provide you with recommendations on how to best upgrade to the latest revisions

Assist you to better use HP Blade System management software tools in order to improve your return on investment

The Blade Health Check contains three deliverables:

HP Blade Technology and Toolset Assessment
HP Blade Firmware and Driver Gap Analysis
HP Blade Technology Bulletin

You can take these deliverables at anytime within one year of purchasing the Blade System Health Check service. We recommend that the HP Blade Technology and Toolset Assessment is delivered within the first month of the Blade enclosure being installed; that the HP Blade Firmware and Driver Gap Analysis is delivered within 5 months of the Blade enclosure being installed; and the HP Blade Technology Bulletin is delivered towards the end of the twelve month period.

Each separate populated Blade enclosure requires one Blade System Health Check which may be coupled with HP hardware and software support, although this is not a prerequisite for the service. You should have HP’s Insight Remote Support (IRS) tool installed.

xma education it computers and technology for schools