HP adds applications consolidation, storage to converged infrastructure picture
Hewlett-Packard on Monday delivered its latest installment of its converged infrastructure effort designed to streamline data center deployments.
The company is rolling out software to better consolidate legacy applications and new storage gear. HP's latest announcement builds on the April launch of its Integrity servers and June refresh of its ProLiant servers. The tools announced Monday are aimed at high availability shops such Wall Street investment firms. HP, like other IT vendors such as Oracle, Dell and IBM, are trying to utilize automation to make data center management easier.
Among the moving parts from HP:
- HP is bolstering its Serviceguard software, which works with the company's HP-UX 11i v3 flavor of Unix. HP is aiming to cut manual configuration and has rolled out extensions for Oracle's e-Business Suite. Katie Curtin-Mestre, director of HP's software planning and marketing, Business Critical Systems, said the general idea is to automate configuration for integrated Oracle apps ranging from financial services, to CRM to related components.
- The Serviceguard software also has a toolkit for Oracle Data Guard to cut down on custom coding as well as graphical clusters for storage and networking in a minute.
- Faster restarts for Oracle Real Application Clusters and SAP. The aim here is to bring applications back up quickly.
- HP's latest software is designed to work with the virtualization containers in HP's new 9000 storage systems. The general idea is to allow IT managers to put older applications in a virtual machine and consolidate them.
Katie Curtin-Mestre, director, software planning and marketing, Business Critical Systems, said the aim for HP is to cut down on IT sprawl and automate "costly choreography."
On the hardware side of the equation, HP launched its StorageWorks P9500 Disk Array, which is designed for high availability. HP's latest system would compete with EMC's Vmax line. The StorageWorks P9500 Disk Array will run you $250,000 for a complete system.
The P9500 system includes a Web console and software dubbed APEX to consolidate storage capacity. Another application called Smart Tiers automatically moves chunks of data without downtime.
What remains to be seen is how HP puts all of these converged infrastructure parts together. For now, HP is doling out the chunks piecemeal.
Update: HP also had two other data center related announcements. First, HP declared itself Cisco free in its data centers. HP replaced external networking gear with its own routers and switches, acquired via 3Com. In an effort to win over networking customers, HP is moving to show it can eat its own dog food.
Separately, HP, Intel and Yahoo said four new partners will join Open Cirrus, an open source test bed for cloud computing. China Mobile Research Institute (CMRI), the Supercomputing Center of Galicia (CESGA), China Telecom’s Guangzhou Research Institute (GSTA), and Georgia Tech University’s Center for Experimental Research in Computer Systems (CERCS) will join Open Cirrus, which now has 14 locations.