HP debuts mission-critical converged infrastructure

SINGAPORE--Hewlett-Packard has beefed up its Converged Infrastructure Architecture portfolio with products geared toward the mission-critical environment, regional executives said Friday in a briefing.

Unveiled last November, HP's Converged Infrastructure Architecture is the vendor's effort to bring together datacenter products and services to help enterprises better manage their IT infrastructure.

The mission-critical component, according to Adrian Jones, senior vice president and general manager for enterprise servers, storage and networking at HP Asia-Pacific and Japan, "wasn't really there" in the converged infrastructure announcement last year. The refresh of the company's Integrity portfolio, built on a new HP Blade Scale Architecture that brings together servers, storage and networking, now broadens the converged array, he said.

The new blade architecture also sees HP unveil a unified platform that spans the x86 ProLiant servers to the Integrity line including Superdome 2, its top-end Integrity server. Superdome 2, which will be released in the second half of 2010, represents the first refresh of Superdome since it was launched a decade ago.

Zhang Ying, HP Asia-Pacific and Japan's vice president and acting general manager for business critical systems, noted that under the new blade architecture, common parts are used in the different systems, which are also designed with the same methodology. The use of the same spare parts can help customers cut costs, he pointed out.

The new systems announced globally this week address mission-critical environments which today face even greater pressure in terms of performance upkeep and management challenges than typical IT environments, Jones said.

The products have been well-received by Asia-Pacific customers, some of whom have placed orders "on the spot", added the executive who is making his rounds in the region for the announcement. Jones and Zhang spoke from Sydney and Beijing, respectively, via the company's telepresence technology, Halo.