HP touts OpenView for Storage Area Management
Speakers from Hewlett-Packard pushed the Openview services concept, stressing its usefulness as a tool to manage network-attached storage functions and several industry analysts maintained that rosier times for all were on the horizon.
Continuing a thread found in recent e-Services announcements, Bill Russell, VP of the Software Solutions Organization that OpenView falls under in HP, emphasized their commitment to enabling e-Services through intelligent connected devices and environments through always-on infrastructure.
So optimistic are they about OpenView, that while companies such as Compaq Computer Corp. and IBM are working together to develop the software fabric for heterogeneous storage, HP is going it alone with what they are calling the HP Federated Storage Area Management strategy.
According to Russell, OpenView as all about manageability. It represents HP's answer to integrated management solutions whether they be storage management, network management or services management. OpenView has been and will continue to be the driving force of HP's services management and define the processes for its overall integration.
Dr Barry Asmus, Senior Economist at the National Center for Policy Analysis was upbeat about the future of the IT industry. Going over the recent downturn in the IT industry, his main premise was that the reason the economies of many countries did not succeed at the end of the 20th century was because control of the economy was left in the hands of governments. He emphasized his view that this should be left to factors like markets and enterprises to fully achieve growth and prosperity.
That paves the way for Patty Azzarello, VP and GM OpenView Business Unit and Bill Emmett, Senior Solutions Manager for HP OpenView to unveil the newest offerings in the OpenView family as well as tout the successes to date.
They claim that OpenView has made HP the 15th largest software company in the world, serving all of the companies in the Fortune 50 and is found in 70% of Internet devices. To increase these numbers, HP announced the release of several new OpenView offerings that they hope would serve the length and breadth of management services in their e-services offerings. Covering areas from solutions for service providers to Internet business management and measurement, these are still targeted at service providers who have made up the large majority of OpenView customers to date.
Many of the OpenView packages offer the ability for service providers to measure and charge 'capacity-on-demand'. This should make it attractive to IDCs, ASPs, ICPs, etc, all those company's to whom such services are an essential part of their business operations.
While OpenView is expanding its service offerings and over different platforms, HP's competitors are also moving towards heterogeneous solutions.
Recent announcements by IBM, EMC, Compaq, Hitachi, Brocade and McData about developing an open SAN configuration complying to Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) standards left HP rather out-in the cold.
Although HP said that OpenView will comply themselves to SNIA standards, the installed base in the corporate world is too complex that any move to heterogeneous solutions needs to be more than a single vendor solution.