HP developing 'smart rack' to ease data center work
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Company shows off labor-saving data center technology at Palo Alto research lab.
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HP is replacing its over-ambitious HP/UX utility data centre (UDC) service with a business automation module for OpenView, which it says will let companies be more flexible.
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Storage appliance maker EqualLogic says its newest product improves performance by doing a better job of balancing the data load between storage arrays in a network.
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Your data center gets the job done today, but how will it handle increasing demands of the future, especially fundamentals such as power and cooling?
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Dell has teamed up with cluster-management app-maker Platform Computing Inc. to create a small but powerful rack-mounted server complete with open-source cluster-management tools.
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-Packard is upgrading its virtualization software offerings to help data center managers better manage their virtual environments, while VMware is offering a virtualization capability for Web hosting companies. HP on Wednesday announced enhancements to its HP Virtual Server Environment software for its Integrity line of servers, which creates a pool of virtual servers that can expand and contract depending on capacity needs. Virtualization refers to the practice of running multiple software applications on one physical server to enhance utilization. Previously, most servers were dedicated to running only one application, but that kept utilization rates as low as 15 to 20 percent. Virtualization increases server utilization, thus reducing the need to buy, power, cool, and manage additional servers. HP also offers a specific software tool, Integrity Essentials Capacity Advisor, for easing the migration of data from Sun servers to HP servers. Although virtualization improves server utilization, it requires different management tools than a nonvirtual environment. HP says the Integrity Essentials Global Workload Manager, another feature of Virtual Server Environment, specifies which computer workloads can automatically access available capacity in order to maintain service level agreements for key applications. The company also announced a new Partner Virtualization Program, which allows ISVs to test how their software will work in an HP virtualization environment. Testing and fine-tuning can be done for virtualization using HP ProLiant and Integrity servers and with a number of operating systems, including HP-Unix, Windows Microsoft, and Novell and Red Hat Linux. The Virtual Server Environment also works with VMware virtualization software. Meanwhile, VMware announced Wednesday the launch of its VMware Service Provider Program, which allows Web hosting services, telecommunications companies, and other outsourcing businesses to include virtual infrastructure as a service offering. Traditional hosting services use dedicated servers for each client, but virtualization makes it possible to run multiple virtual servers, even for different clients, on one physical server. The Web hosting company can then bill clients monthly based on how many virtual machines they use, not physical ones, VMware said.
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Storage Expo Iomega punts a hard disk autoloader
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-PackardÂ introduced an entry-level rack server in India on Thursday, part of its strategy to design lower-cost servers specifically for Asian countries. Asia has high growth markets like China and India, but the needs and usage models of customers there are different from those elsewhere in the world, Paul Miller, HPâs vice president of marketing for Industry Standard Servers (ISS) and BladeSystems, told reporters in Bangalore on Thursday. A large proportion of customers in Asia, including smaller businesses, don't need all the features included with HP servers sold in other regions, said Tony Parkinson, HPâs vice president and general manager for ISS in the Asia Pacific. âCustomers in Asia want a âgood enoughâ product which is reliable, good quality, good brand, and not very expensiveâ, he said. The new server, the ProLiant DL180, is based on Dual Core and Quad-Core Xeon processors from Intel and priced from 100,000 Indian rupees, or about $2,500. HP said the servers will help Asian businesses to migrate from tower servers to rack servers, by offering the efficiency of a rack server and the economics of a tower server. Users in Asia often stuff tower servers into racks because of space constraints, but have not migrated to rack servers because of their higher costs, Miller said. Some of the features and components, included as standard on similar HP rack servers, are offered as options on the DL180 to drive down costs, said Kevin Van Mondfrans, HPâs manager of product marketing for ISS. For example, while Asian customers want basic management capabilities, they don't see a need for the more sophisticated management software typically offered on these servers, he said. Usage models also differ in Asia, according to HP. The DL180 is likely to be used as a standalone storage server in Asia, while customers in the U.S. tend to use such systems as part of a storage area network (SAN), Parkinson said. The products for Asia are being designed at an HP ProLiant design center in Taiwan. Asia is the only region the company is designing special products for, Miller said. However, some of the products for Asia may be offered later in other developing markets, such as Latin America and Russia, he said. The ProLiant ML115, introduced in March as a tower server at the cost of a desktop, was designed for Asia but eventually introduced in other parts of the world. HP will offer customers in Asia a mix of Asia-specific products and standard products, as some Asian customers, such as large enterprises, want the full-featured products, Parkinson said. He did not say how many more servers HP is designing exclusively for the region.
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-Packard is developing new storage hardware that will make it easier for administrators to assign the right amount of storage to different departments in an organization. HP on Monday announced plans for new models in its midrange EVA series of disk storage arrays at the HP Technology Forum in Las Vegas. The EVA 4100, 6100, and 8100, due later this year, feature what HP calls Dynamic Capacity Management. Typically, when a company buys new storage capacity, it apportions it to different programs or different business functions in the organization. It can lead to the false impression that the company has used up all its storage capacity. Dynamic Capacity Management (DCM), HP said, allows the storage manager of a company to assign capacity to various departments or functions as needed and allows the system to reduce capacity assigned to departments if they're not using it up at the rate they thought they would. This saves companies the cost of buying more storage capacity they may not need, said Mark Gonzalez, vice president of enterprise server and storage sales at HP. "Perhaps you don't have to buy as much storage as you had to before and because of that, you use less power, use less cooling and can delay your purchases," Gonzalez said. "What's the most expensive storage that you'll buy? The storage that you have to buy today." Gonzalez said the EVAs may carry a list price somewhere in the range of $35,000 to $40,000. HP offers DCM, what it also calls thin provisioning, in the high-end XP line of disk storage arrays it introduced in May. The availability of it on the EVA line will coincide with the launch of Microsoft's new Windows Server 2008 operating system, which is due out later this year. Besides assigning storage capacity more in line with actual use, the EVAs will utilize a Windows feature that can reduce the size of storage capacity already assigned and reassign it to another purpose. But storage provisioning is as much a problem of office politics as it is technology, said Andrew Reichman, a storage industry analyst with Forrester Research Inc. Software application administrators at companies ask for as much storage as they can get because it's difficult to add more space later. But storage administrators want to preserve storage capacity so they don't have to buy more storage capacity unnecessarily. In the back and forth of office politics, Reichman said, the software administrators tend to win these battles. But with DCM, which he thinks is more accurately called "adaptive provisioning," assigning and adjusting capacity is easier and better assures applications will get the storage they need but not more than they need, he said. "Adaptive provisioning is good for environments where you have good communications. Where the server admins and the applications admins say 'I agree to take less and will trust you to grow it for me as time goes so we use less resources,'" Reichman said. "In my experience those environments are few and far between." HP also announced it's introducing a new tape drive for data storage and its first tape storage device in a blade form factor.
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Linux Networx has developed a clustered storage appliance which is able to pool capacity from separate storage devices into a single high-capacity resource.
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HP launches new low-priced, disk-based backup and recovery system.
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HP is offering a 16GB drive with its dc7800 PC, which it said will greatly reduce the computer's energy consumption, start-up time and application load and execute much faster when disk access is needed.
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Hewlett-Packard has announced four entry-level servers for SMBs, along with updates to its remote management software.The servers are part of HP&#39;s ProLiant 100 series, aimed at companies with 100 to 500 employees. They are all two-processor rack-mount servers, with two 1U machines and two 2U machines. (The 1U refers to the height of the machine and is equal to 1.75 inches.)Rack-mount servers have lost the limelight lately to trendy blade servers, sales of which are growing at a faster clip, and even HP&#39;s vice president of marketing, Paul Gottsegen, who was charged with promoting the new rack-mount servers, advised customers to look closely at blades.&quot;When they see the blades, customers tell us there&#39;s an advantage in cooling, in cabling, in reduced power consumption and overall density, so the rack customers typically transition to blades, it&#39;s just a matter of customers in this market becoming aware of them,&quot; he said.Still, rack-mount servers account for a high proportion of sales despite their slower growth, and smaller companies tend to be more comfortable sticking with what they are used to, said Gordon Haff, principal IT adviser at Illuminata.Two of the HP servers are available now. One is the DL185 G5, a 2U system designed for high-capacity jobs like mail serving and video capture. It comes with up to 14 large-form factor drives and 10.5TB of storage, and it runs on one or two Opteron 2200 processors from AMD. Pricing starts at $1,749.The other machine on sale now is the DL160 G5, a 1U server that can act as a node in a high-performance computing cluster as well as a standard business server. It has two PCI-Express x16 2.0 slots and support for a faster front-side bus, and it runs one or two of Intel&#39;s quad-core 5400 &quot;Harpertown&quot; chips. Pricing starts at $1,399.The other two machines won&#39;t ship for another three months, HP said. They are the DL180, a general-purpose 2U server with three PCI-E slots and up to 12 large form factor drives, and the DL 165, which will be the first rack-mount server that can hold four 3.5-inch disk drives, according to HP. Pricing for those servers was not announced.HP has been doing well in the server market lately. In the third quarter last year, it sold more machines than second-place Dell or third-place IBM, although IBM earned the most revenue, research company Gartner said.Low-end servers are fairly commoditized, and there isn&#39;t a great deal that distinguishes one vendor&#39;s hardware from another, Haff said. &quot;Certainly, there are some differences in areas like management software, but for the most part, it&#39;s about the channels and the partners and what&#39;s offered around the server,&quot; he said.HP announced two Lights-Out management packages for the servers. They allow users to install software remotely and monitor the health of fans, power supplies and other components. A Lights-Out 100i Advanced Pack is $199 per license and a Select Pack is $99. Customers must also buy a Remote Management Card for $219.HP also announced two updated software packages for the machines. They are Citrix Access Essentials, for remote access to applications, and Exchange Server 2007, the latest version of Microsoft&#39;s e-mail server software.
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EXTENDING the boundaries of workstation computing, HP has introduced a low-cost workstation that brings unprecedented performance to the entrylevel market.
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(Source: LeftHand Networks)  Combine LeftHand SAN/iQ clustering software with the world's top selling enterprise server platforms like the HP DL380 to create a cost-effective, yet powerful iSCSI SAN.
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SAN FRANCISCO -- A high-tech consortium led by Intel (Quote, Chart) and HP (Quote, Chart) is looking to capitalize on an additional layer of protocol services they claim will streamline Internet traffic.
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Storage appliance maker EqualLogic Inc. says its newest product improves performance by doing a better job of balancing the data load between storage arrays in a network.