HP is its own case study with datacenter project
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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.
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Hewlett-Packard's decision to combine its PC and printing businesses makes sense.
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(InfoWorld) - Many of the customers attending this week's Hewlett-Packard Technology Forum in Las Vegas ran back and forth across the Mandalay Bay Hotel & Casino's convention center absorbing all they could about virtualization. There were 87 workshops dedicated to the new approach to improving the efficiency of data-center operations. Nick van der Zweep, HP's director of virtualization programs, had a full schedule Thursday, meeting with customers to answer their questions. Although virtualization is gaining traction, it presents new management challenges to data-center operators, van der Zweep said, discussing virtualization's promise and management issues in an interview. An edited transcript follows. IDGNS: What is your message to HP customers this week? Van der Zweep: The message is that we're heading into pervasive virtualization now. If you look back over a number of years, it was a lot of early adopters that were in the fray. Now it's really difficult to find a company that hasn't done some project. With enterprise customers and even some large-to-medium-sized customers, 75 percent of them tell us that they have already implemented a virtualization project or will implement one within 12 months. We certainly don't see 75 percent of our servers going out the door with virtualization on them. We're probably, in the ProLiant space, in the single digits, but growing fast. Of our Integrity high-end servers, probably around 60 percent of them go out with virtualization. IDGNS: Of those who are in that 75 percent, how are they deploying it? I've heard people say they're more likely to try virtualization in a part of their IT system like software testing and development than in production. Are you finding that? Van der Zweep: I've seen lots in production. When we ask for a show of hands in customer meetings of how many are using virtualization, 75 percent of the hands go up. And when we ask how many are using it in production, of the 75 percent who put their hands up only about 25 percent of them put their hands down. IDGNS: But while virtualization has its benefits, we're hearing that it adds a degree of complexity to system management that can be difficult for customers. Is that what you're hearing? Van der Zweep: Yes and no. If you think about a physical machine, you've got the hardware, and you install Windows or Linux or HP-UX or whatever, and that's it. Then you run your operations. When you put virtualization into the fray, you now get the box, and you install the hypervisor, and then you slice it up [apportioning a number of virtual machines onto the physical servers]. Some of the early adopter companies took a few people from their staff ... managing servers and put them off to the side and said, 'You are our virtualization guinea pig people'. They would learn how to manage virtualization, and the rest of the staff would stay and manage the physical boxes. But as you move more of those servers into production, that allows the staff group to reunite again. We integrated virtualization management into Systems Insight Manager so you see the whole [environment]. But you can get yourself into some trouble with virtualization. Before, you had 10 servers and 10 copies of Windows. Now you might have 10 physical servers but 50 virtual servers. You've got to manage across a much bigger virtual environment than the physical environment you had in the past. We had a lot of pleas from our customers to 'please pull this back together so we can provide better management of the virtual environment'. IDGNS: Is your virtualization manager software brand agnostic? Van der Zweep: We focus Systems Insight Manager and Virtual Machine Manager on our ProLiant servers, for instance, but if you have a Dell or IBM server with VMware installed on it, it will detect it's Dell or IBM, that there's VMware on it, and work in that environment. IDGNS: But is the interaction the same experience as if it were an HP server? Van der Zweep: For the most part. From a VMware standpoint, it's equivalent, but [it's different] when you get into hardware specifics. You can click on a ProLiant server and see the temperatures and fan speeds, and if something goes wrong, Systems Insight Manager can even call back to HP and have somebody come up to fix it without you even knowing about it. We don't do that for the Dell and IBM systems.
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InfoWorld - Hewlett-Packard plans to buy datacenter automation software vendor Opsware for about $1.6 billion.
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The Bangalore center will focus on building SOA competency within HP, delivering SOA services to HP's customers and also host customers who want to run proof-of-concepts for their SOA implementations.
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) has set up an SOA (service-oriented architecture) center in Bangalore, India, which will be one of five SOA centers run by HP worldwide. The Bangalore center will focus on building SOA competency within HP, delivering SOA services to HPâs customers and also host customers who want to run proof-of-concepts for their SOA implementations, said Shrinivas Gorur, head of the center, on Friday. The center is part of HPâs proposed US$500 million investment in SOA for enterprise customers, Gorur said. He did not disclose how much HP invested in the Bangalore center. HP, of Palo Alto, California, also has SOA centers in Sophia Antipolis, France, and Tokyo, with two more planned in Singapore and Cupertino, California, by January, Gorur said. With about 125 staff, the Bangalore center will work closely with HPâs 6,500 staff involved in delivering SOA to customers worldwide, Gorur added. IBM Corp. last month set up an SOA Solutions Center in Pune in western India, focused on developing reusable SOA services for a variety of customers. HP's Bangalore center will focus on reusability at the design level rather than of specific code, because of potential intellectual property issues, Gorur said.
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Unisys announced new servers and a suite of infrastructure management software Tuesday that are aimed at giving it a bigger role to play in customers&#39; datacenters, where it will compete more directly with Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems.The new hardware includes Unisys&#39; first blade servers, the ES5000 family, due next month, and new and upgraded ES3000 midrange servers based on quad-core Intel Xeon processors. The company has also refreshed and rebranded some datacenter management software that it launched early last year.The products continue a turnaround strategy that Unisys began in 2005. A focus on high-end servers, outsourcing and systems integration had led to financial losses, and Unisys devised a restructuring plan to enter faster-growing markets including open-source software, security and infrastructure management.The strategy leans heavily on partners. The blade servers will be supplied by another, unnamed server vendor and tagged with the Unisys brand, while the infrastructure software includes third-party products from Enigmatic and Scalent Systems.The strategy is to lead with services offerings to help customers build what Unisys calls a &quot;real-time infrastructure&quot; -- one where IT adapts quickly to business needs -- and to supplement those the hardware and software products, said Rich Marcello, president of Unisys&#39; systems and technology group.&quot;This isn&#39;t just a product sell. The real-time infrastructure is relatively complicated to implement so you need a services-led strategy,&quot; he said. &quot;Many of our competitors will talk about doing RTI but what they are doing is trying to sell you a complete stack.&quot;Unisys&#39; product line-up is not greatly different from that of Sun, HP and others. But its strategy differs in that it aims to capture clients through consulting and service engagements and then bring in the products they need for a project, including gear from other vendors, said Jean Bozman [cq], a research vice president with IDC.&quot;They&#39;re not saying their value is to deliver everything with a Unisys label. Their value is to leverage their experience with customer engagements to bring products together and make sure they all work as part of an overall solution,&quot; Bozman said.The new infrastructure management suite piggy-backs on the trend of helping customers align their IT infrastructures to business requirements. This includes using virtualization and systems management software to reallocate computing resources to meet changing workloads.Called the Unisys Infrastructure Management Suite it includes three parts: uAdapt, for shifting workloads between servers to get better rates of utilization; uOrchestrate, for automating processes and meeting service-level agreements; and uChargeback, which lets big companies measure server usage and charge individual departments for computing services they use, Marcello said.Unisys announced some infrastructure management software early last year, including a home-grown product called Enterprise Orchestration. That product has been &quot;superseded&quot; by uOrchestrate, which is based on software from Enigmatic. UChargeback is a rebranded version of last year&#39;s Real Time Chargeback, and uAdapt is a new offering based on software from Scalent Systems.The three products work with any hardware platform running Windows, Linux, or Unix, and all are certified to run VMware&#39;s virtualization technology. UAdapt and uOrchestrate also work with Citrix Systems&#39; Xen virtualization technology, and uChargeback will be certified for Xen shortly, a Unisys spokesman said.The blade servers will come with &quot;flexible I/O configuration options and advanced local and remote management interfaces,&quot; Unisys said. The company also plans to expand its high-end ES7000 line with a quad core, eight-processor server due in the second quarter. Later this year it will introduce brand new ES7000 models from a partnership with Japan&#39;s NEC.&#160;
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Unisys announced new servers and a suite of infrastructure management software Tuesday that are aimed at giving it a bigger role to play in customers' datacenters, where it will compete more directly with Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems.
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InfoWorld - Like other adopters of server virtualization, Purdue University was concerned that its datacenter would hit the wall, exceeding physical space, power, and cooling limits. The use of EMC VMware let it combine 140 physical servers into three Hewlett-Packard DL-585 servers, a 40:1 compression ratio, says Mike Rubesch, director of IT infrastructure systems. &quot;It helps postpone the inevitable,&quot; he adds.
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Grid computing links computers to harness their collective resources. HP said its grid approach to storage is designed to let customers focus more on how they use data, not how they store it.
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Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) has set up an SOA (service-oriented architecture) center in Bangalore, India, which will be one of five SOA centers run by HP worldwide.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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Company uses proprietary technology to create high-capacity server memory module.
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Hewlett-Packard Co. is planning to spend $3 billion over the next three years to grow the server product line that runs on Intel Corp.
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Two weeks ago, Hewlett-Packard introduced the most unique PC it has ever built, and that perhaps any major manufacturer has built in decades. It's the product of a merger of vastly differing mindsets - the clinical, practical engineers of HP with the wild, daring, and often over-the-top designers of VoodooPC. The Blackbird 002 may be HP's first real museum piece, as we discover in this premiere BetaNews Profile of the first product of HP's Gaming Division and its leader, Rahul Sood.
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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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Hoping to prove that grid computing can work in the business world, Dell, EMC, Intel and Oracle have announced a joint effort designed to show business users how to use the distributed computing technology.
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-Packard plans to buy datacenter automation software vendor Opsware for about $1.6 billion. HP said Monday that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Opsware in a cash tender deal that values the company at $14.25 per share. Opsware's stock was $10.28 at the close of Friday's trading. Once the deal closes, HP plans to combine the Opsware software with its own enterprise IT management software, as the new acquisition becomes part of HP's software business. "The acquisition of Opsware is intended to enable HP Software to help our customers resolve one of their critical pain points: controlling the increasing complexity and cost of managing the datacenter," Thomas Hogan, senior vice president of software at HP, said in a news release. HP has been steadily expanding its business technology optimization portfolio over the last couple of years through acquisitions, including the purchases ofÂ Mercury InteractiveÂ andÂ Peregrine Systems. After HP has closed the acquisition, the vendor expects to appoint Opsware CEO Ben Horowitz as head of its business technology optimization organization, reporting to Hogan. Subject to regulatory approval, HP hopes to close the purchase before the end of October. Opsware System software automates data center operations including provisioning, configuration, and deployment. Â