Means to an end: New HP management tools address green IT challenges

I'm sure it doesn't surprise you (given the state of the economy) that More and more often, various data center management tools are being repositioned under companies' green IT initiatives. It makes sense, if you think about it, because the two truly proven IT strategies that have had a direct impact on green initiatives AND that have a demonstrable, almost immediate return on investment message are consolidation and virtualization, which present very thorny management challenges.

So, even though the Adaptive Infrastructure portfolio from Hewlett-Packard is technically a management architecture, I think it's worth mentioning this week's product update, especially considering the installed base of HP servers in corporate data centers.

Among the software that has been updated this week are the Insight Dynamics - VSE , Insight Orchestration and Insight Recovery components.

A recap of what these things do: Insight Orchestration is designed to handle design, configuration and deployments of new images (either physical or virtual) and can automate workflows; it's currently an option on HP ProLiant servers but will ship on HP Integrity systems later this year.

Insight Recovery is essentially a disaster-recovery tool that works in tandem with the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array and gets environments on either HP BladeSystem servers or VMware virtual machines up and running again quickly after a blip or interruption in operations.

Insight Dynamics collects and analyzes hardware utilization information from servers (including those from Dell, IBM and other HP competitors) with an eye to migrating the environments to HP BladeSystem or HP ProLiant servers. The software is intended to accelerate server consolidation projects.