Wearing of the green: HP stakes claim in energy-efficiency services, software
Hewlett-Packard must be thrilled with Forrester Research's report a couple of weeks ago, showing an enormous opportunity in assessment and design services around making technology infrastructure more energy-efficient and just generally greener. I'll send you to my blog for reference, but to excerpt the data: It estimates the typical assessment phase at $50,000 for six weeks, while a typical planning project could be $250,000 over 12 weeks. And then there's the implementation: anywhere from $300,000 to $2 million. Sweet!
So, the giant tech company certainly didn't waste any time with its acquisition of EYP Mission Critical Facilities, a consulting company with expertise in energy-efficient data center design, which it closed just last month. It has repackaged a set of those services into what it now calls the HP Critical Facilities Services line. Mapping beautifully to the Forrester stats I just mentioned, those services include Critical Facilities Consulting, which involves strategic and tactical data center planning; Critical Facilities Design, which are suggestions and solutions for "technology-intensive, high-performance facilities; and Critical Facilities Assurance; which focuses on testing and tweaking to improve the overall green creds and reliability of existing infrastructure.
Ewald Comhaire, director of Global Infrastructure Services for HP Services, says one recent project involving services such as the aforementioned resulted in an infrastructure reduction of 41 percent. (Or the equivalent of 2,400 tons of carbon dioxide annually.)
These consulting services are just one piece of a much bigger hullabaloo HP is making today around data center consolidation and virtualization (including a new ProLiant DL785 G5 eight-socket, quad-core Opteron server aimed at virtualization tasks) that I'm sure that Larry Dignan and others here on the ZDNet blog network will cover much more thoroughly. I actually believe that virtualization is the greenest tech of all the green tech stuff I write about, but that's a much longer discussion for a much longer post.
Anyway, in the words of one HP exec, the company lives and breathes this energy-efficiency stuff and is bringing an energy-efficiency mindset to everything from "chip to chiller." Which is by way of suggesting that some of its competitors are not. Ahem, not to go there right now. It's kind of fun, though, to see HP and IBM and Dell all vie for the most emerald green mantle.
One product I DO want to mention that's part of today's barrage is HP Insight Dynamics - VSE. This is a piece of management software that will let IT manager look at and manage ALL of HP's infrastructure -- both virtualized AND physical servers -- from one central view. (It will accommodate hypervisors from multiple vendors, which another good thing.) The software includes features from HP Virtual Server Environment, HP Insight Control and HP Virtual Connect, and it plugs into the HP Systems Insight Manager platform. Another thing you get: a real-time capacity planning tool called Smart Solver, which provides immediate feedback on server capacity or power usage based on historical stats. (And, not just stats for your own infrastructure.)
The reason this is cool is that the software should let data center managers rebalance or repurpose various servers within their infrastructure more quickly and with fewer resources. The company is claiming that it will reduce the cost of "common data center tasks" by up to 40 percent.
HP Insight Dynamics - VSE will be out sometime in the second calendar quarter of this year for HP BladeSystem, ProLiant and Integrity servers.