HP Extends Server Leadership
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HP (www.hp.com) announced an investment of more than $3 billion over the next three years designed to vault Intel Itanium 2-based HP Integrity servers to the leadership position in the $20 billion market currently served by RISC processors.
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(InfoWorld) - The $100 millionÂ datacenter consolidation projectÂ being undertaken by Hewlett-Packard will help it be more efficient but also informs the consulting advice it gives to client companies. HP officials updated customers, employees and partners on the progress of its project Tuesday at the HP Technology Forum being held in Las Vegas. The company is in the second year of a three-year process to consolidate 85 datacenters worldwide in just six -- two each in Atlanta, Houston, and Austin, Texas. Three of the six new sites are already up and running and the remaining three should be completed within 60 days, said Randy Mott, executive vice president and chief information officer of HP. "It's not just around moving stuff to a different place," said Mott, in a clear case of understatement. Data center consolidation gives HP, and any company that does it, a chance to refresh their technology, move to industry standard products, eliminate redundant or outdated hardware and software, and engineer energy efficiency, a major concern of late, into the datacenter. At the Tech Forum, Mott said the data center project, which is scheduled to be completed in late 2008, will reduce the total number of servers by 30 percent, but increase the total processing power by 80 percent. It will reduce the cost of storage but double total storage capacity, and the cost of running HP's corporate network will go down but the bandwidth will be tripled. HP has already decommissioned 12 of the 86 datacenters, said Mott. And for HP, going through the process gives its HP Services group new insights they can apply to customers trying to upgrade their data centers. "We try make sure it's done right inside HP and then we can do that for customers," said Tony Redmond, vice president and chief technology officer for HP Services. Teams from HP's IT department, which handles the company's own IT systems, and from the HP Technology Services unit, which provides technology to client firms, work together on the datacenter project. Work the HP Services people do will help the Technology Services people advise their own clients, Redmond said. HP's technology infrastructure developed in a piecemeal fashion, just like that of many other companies. For instance, part of the project involves what companies call "software rationalization," going through the thousands of software applications that HP uses to weed out those that are redundant, outdated or just useless. HP applications may be duplicated by similar applications from Compaq Computer, which HP acquired in 2002 and Digital Equipment, which Compaq bought in 1998. HP is also going to deploy a new approach to cooling at the new datacenters. Called Dynamic Smart Cooling, it involves a number of heat sensors attached to each of the servers in a datacenter. The sensors can tell when a server is heating up because it's doing a lot of processing and then directs cold air at that server. When the server slows down, the sensor can tell and the cold air reduced. Dynamic Smart Cooling, developed within HP Labs, will demonstrate at HP's own datacenters how the technology may work for others.
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CHICAGO - Hewlett-Packard Co. customers will continue to have difficulties ordering custom configurations of HP's ProLiant servers though the end of August, company executives told attendees at the HP World conference in Chicago Tuesday. The problems are due to continuing problems with an SAP AG order processing and supply-chain deployment rolled out last month, they said.
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Hewlett-Packard has unveiled a host of upgrades to its Integrity server product line, including faster Intel Itanium 2 processors, new virtualization capabilities, and new production releases of the OpenVMS and Linux operating systems.
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(InfoWorld) - HP on Monday announced it has upgraded products in its service management portfolio to help customers expedite changes, automate software distribution and align IT processes with the best practices of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). At its HP Software Universe conference in Las Vegas, the company announced updated software and services that it says will help reduce manual error and maintain more good configurations across distributed systems. The company also introduced a product, HP Change Control Management Software, which incorporates a change advisory board -- recommended in ITIL -- into software. The software, built on technology acquired with Mercury Interactive, helps automate approvals processes and reduces the need for multiple change advisory meetings to push changes out to systems, industry watchers say. "This product can eliminate tasks that a change advisory board would typically have to do," says Evelyn Hubbert, a senior analyst with Forrester Research. Because the software incorporates Mercury technology with HP's focus on service management and ITIL best practices, Hubbert says, "HP has done more work than it has in the past at working across different divisions. The product is a significant step forward in integration." HP also announced upgrades to its HP Configuration Management Software, also built on acquired technology from Novadigm. This product picks up where the change-control product leaves off, HP says, by pushing out changes approved by the change advisory board to production systems. The vendor also says this software can help with rolling out virtualization software and migrating systems to Vista. Forrester's Hubbert says the product "closes the loop on rolling out changes" for customers and reveals HP's product plans to "trickle out" more automation in its software. "It is a real pain point for clients to see a change from initiation to conclusion. HP is offering another proof point in automation, but also addressing that pain point," Hubbert says. "The company is also doing a better job of aligning their products and building a better implementation road map." Last, HP announced its Best Practices for Service Center services, which help organizations accelerate the adoption of HP Service Center software and align internal IT-management processes with those if ITIL Version 2 as well as Version 3 of the best-practice framework. The software and services are available. HP did not disclose pricing information.
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HP added the ability for block data and file data storage to its Enterprise Virtual Array family of arrays in Windows or Linux environments and integrated Cisco's MDS switch into its blade servers, among other product announcements.
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Securing the Itanic HP this week moved to bulk up the security tools available with its HP-UX operating system.â¦
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HP is the latest to offer a server-storage product targeted to small- to mid-size businesses.
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-Packard launched a server based onÂ Intel's new Tigerton quad-core Xeon processorÂ Thursday, battling IBM for customers who run data-intensive business applications like enterprise resource planning and virtualization software. HP announced the rack-based ProLiant DL580 G5 and the blade-shaped ProLiant BL680c G5, each using four of Intel's Xeon 7300-series chips. Compared to HP's current ProLiant servers with dual-core versions of the Xeon or AMD's Opteron chips, both new servers are designed to better support virtualization, allowing users to handle their applications with a smaller number of servers than they need today, the company said. The announcement comes less than a week before AMD is expected to launch its own quad-core server chip, called Barcelona. HP, SunÂ and other vendors are expected to use that processor in a range of new platforms for similar markets. In the meantime, Intel is enjoying increased popularity for its Tigerton chip. IBM also chose the Xeon 7300 chip to upgrade its server lineup, combining the processor with its own X4 chipset instead of Intel's Clarksboro chipset. IBM announced the System x3950 M2 server on Wednesday, also touting its virtualization abilities. IBM designed the server for fast-growing businesses so it can easily scale up for larger deployments, such as data centers and ERP or CRM applications from providers like SAP and Oracle, said Jay Bretzmann, manager of product marketing for IBM. Compared to systems based on its X3 chipset, IBM will add memory and an internal USBÂ interface for loading embedded virtualization software. "As cores started multiplying, the need for memory started growing, particularly in the virtualization space. So we offered a low entry price point and head room to grow," Bretzmann said. Together, those improvements will allow users to get greater utilization out of their servers instead of having the computers sit idle while waiting for new jobs, he said. "There are so many applications that really scale. Databases are the flagship; if you write a database that doesn't scale well, you're not going to be in business for long. But virtualization allows you to load multiple OSes and achieve the flexibility and utilization that are key for quad-core technology," he said. IBM intends to keep its X4 chipset in the market through 2009, then offer a fifth-generation version by 2010, he said. IBM plans to launch the System x3950 M2 server at high volume in the fourth quarter. HP is selling the DL580 for $9,219 and the BL680c for $9,669. IBM will announce pricing for the System x3950 M2 when it is shipped, in the fourth quarter.
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Hewlett-Packard is beefing up its Integrity BladeSystems with a new model released last week thatâs intended to handle memory and CPU intensive applications.
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InfoWorld - Hewlett-Packard has begun shipping a new product that the company thinks will give it an edge over rival IBM&#160;in the market for blade servers.
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HP World Free Alpha upgrades to stem defections
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Hewlett-Packard Co., aiming to beef up its erratic enterprise computing business with new products, said Monday it is launching new high-end and mid-range server-computers and related software and services early this week.
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By Brad Hem, Houston Chronicle  Feb. 18--An engineering team at HP had figured out how to squeeze a faster and more powerful computer server into one-third the traditional space. That was supposed to be the hard part.
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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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(Source: HP)  HP-UX 11i v3 delivers new features that enhance leadership in flexible capacity, secured availability, and simplified management, and OS performance that turbocharges your applications.
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InfoWorld - Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sun Microsystems will this week announce an effort they are spearheading to extend the open source Globus Toolkit for grid technologies to commercial enterprise deployments.