HP unleashes barrage of offerings to add more 'oomph' to Converged Infrastructure benefits

Building on the momentum of its Converged Infrastructure strategy, HP this week announced new server, storage, network and power management technologies to enable clients to shift millions of dollars in operational costs to activities that drive business innovation.

HP’s Converged Infrastructure provides a blueprint for clients that want to eliminate sprawl, complexity and excess maintenance costs. The introductions at HP Tech Forum in Las Vegas include advancements in HP BladeSystem, including several new servers, as well as innovations in HP Virtual Connect and HP BladeSystem Matrix.

Also announced were power management technologies to automate energy awareness and control of IT systems across the data center, as well as storage software that provides new levels of simplicity and automation through a single, unified architecture for data deduplication. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The Tech Forum announcements come on the heels of the previous week's HP Software Universe news.

Among the new offerings are:

• Three new HP ProLiant scale-up servers, which offer several industry firsts with memory footprints of up to 2 terabytes (TB) and “self-healing” memory capabilities that maximize application uptime with a 200 percent boost in availability. Optimized for data-intensive workloads, the servers reduce data center footprint, complexity, and costs with a consolidation ratio up to 91-to-1.
• Seven new HP ProLiant G7 server blades with 1 TB of memory and integrated 10Gb Virtual Connect FlexFabric technology for I/O scalability. These systems can support up to four times more virtual machines, while requiring 66 percent less hardware.
• The new HP Virtual Connect FlexFabric module, a single device that connects servers to any Fibre Channel, Ethernet and iSCSI network. This eliminates the need for multiple interconnects.
• HP BladeSystem Matrix software, which offers one-touch, self-service provisioning of applications. The “all inclusive” converged infrastructure offering enables private clouds by allowing clients to deploy complex IT environments in minutes. As a result, HP claims that clients can reduce their total cost of ownership up to 56 percent compared to traditional IT infrastructures.
• HP Intelligent Power Discovery, which creates an automated, energy-aware network between HP ProLiant servers, third-party facility management tools, and data center power grids. The software provides greater transparency and insight into power usage by creating a real-time, graphical map of energy usage across servers and facilities. By accurately provisioning energy, HP estimates that clients can extend the lives of their data centers and save up to $5 million per every 1,000 servers in one year.
• HP StoreOnce, a solution to automate data deduplication across the enterprise with a single unified architecture. It is built on patented innovation and features designed by HP Labs, the company’s research arm and reduces costs by eliminating multiple stored versions of the same data.

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