HPE Synergy is the platform designed and marketed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to deliver composable infrastructure capabilities to a data centre. Just four years old, HPE Synergy is widely regarded as the leading platform for an emerging architecture known as composable infrastructure. At its simplest, and as its name suggests, composable infrastructure refers to the ability to construct a computer as you require – by integrating and adding components as necessary, and then subtracting them from the system when they are not needed.

Enabled by the use of an API, it means the server, storage and network hardware can be added together to create an entire physical system from shared pools of disaggregated resources. And this can all be achieved without the systems operator physically attending the site.

Different and better

Traditionally, servers and storage arrays have been stand-alone products, with fixed amounts of processor, memory and storage capacities set at the time of installation. This leads to them being physically limited in the amount of workload they can handle, unless they are physically upgraded.

Composable infrastructure, however, has the great advantage of being scalable. Instead of an infrastructure designed and optimised for a particular workload, a platform like HPE Synergy makes it possible to be much more flexible, allowing bare-metal servers and storage systems to be configured swiftly and easily as needs change.

Composable infrastructure is not based on a hypervisor or software-defined storage, but comprises assembled systems that appear as bare-metal servers. It can also be used as the hardware layer from which to build programmable infrastructure, which is managed by APIs, software-defined and able to decouple applications from the underlying infrastructure while hiding the complexity at work from its consumers.

The benefits of composable infrastructure include:

  • increased flexibility and speed in delivering bare-metal servers and storage systems
  • improved agility to accommodate increases and decreases in workloads, and
  • increased efficiency in utilisation of resources.

Use cases

Common use cases for composable infrastructure will include multi-tenant platform services, baremetal workload consolidation, analytics and AI (artificial intelligence). A business that operates nine to five is likely to have very different workloads depending on what time of the day it is. Outside of business hours, composable infrastructure would reconfigure. Synergy profiles can be defined to suit, with different operating system, storage and application data disk configurations, while shutting down servers, applying a different profile and booting into alternative operating systems and applications.

As some organisations have workloads that are unpredictable, so too is their resource consumption.

A different number of servers may be required on different working days. Synergy is able to dynamically reconfigure bare-metal servers and join new servers to the working group.

Future visions

It will be some time before composable infrastructure in the enterprise is a fully realised technology. When optimised it will be able to revolutionise compute, storage and networking architectural approaches over time.