HP Launches New Server Management Tool
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Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) has begun shipping a new product that the company thinks will give it an edge over rival IBM Corp. in the market for blade servers.
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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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Hewlett-Packard Co. has updated and expanded its Itanium-based Integrity server line by adding new low-end models, processor upgrades and better virtualization support.
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-Packard is enhancing security features on the HP-UX operating system for its Integrity line of servers amid growing customer concern about recent network security breaches. HP is announcing Monday the availability of a free upgrade to HP-UX 11i v2 that automatically encrypts data as it is stored. HP has offered this capability before, but this upgrade puts the encryption capability right into the operating system (OS). "If it's in the operating system, it's easily implemented without needing to do anything, and you're not going to break anything," said Charles Kolodgy, a research director at IDC focused on secure content and threat management products. IDC is about to release results of a survey of IT managers on their network security spending priorities for 2007, Kolodgy said. The survey will show that "file and folder encryption" has rocketed to the number one spot, from fifth in the 2006 survey, surpassing common concerns such as firewalls, network intrusion, viruses and spyware. What's changed in the last year is theÂ number of reports of serious security breaches, from theÂ U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs laptop stolenÂ in May and recovered in June, to the Dec. 12 report ofÂ hackers accessing personal information on 800,000Â current and prospective students at the University of California, Los Angeles. Sun Microsystems has added encryption capabilities to its Solaris OS that it originally offered only on its Trusted Solaris system for sensitive governmental use, Kolodgy said. And Microsoft is including an encryption feature called BitLocker in its new Vista OS. "They are all attempting to bring these solutions to the end user," he said, but he added that the HP upgrade is improved over prior HP offerings. HP is also offering an optional embedded chip on its Integrity servers that holds the digital keys to decrypt protected data. It claims this approach is more secure than software-based keys. Also, a new feature called HP Protected Systems allows a network security administrator to isolate certain data in unique compartments and configure different security settings for that data as needed. Adding encryption capabilities directly to storage hardware can require an expensive upgrade, which enterprises can avoid with an OS upgrade, said Ron Luman, the security architect for HP-UX. "What we have been asked to do [by customers] is provide something that is transparent to the applications and also transparent to the storage hardware, and so that means doing something to the operating system itself," Luman said.
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Storage powerhouses Hewlett-Packard Co. and QLogic Corp. have created an easy-to-use SAN-in-a-box product targeted at small and midsize businesses.
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Mixes-up mid-market merchandise Hewlett-Packard is pushing four new ProLiant servers destined for the wiring closets of mid-sized businesses. According to HP's Proliant marketing director John Gromala, the new systems will revamp the company's SMB gear with more compact systems and lower prices.â¦
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Hewlett-Packard has joined with Brocade to integrate Brocade&#39;s storage area network switching technology into HP Bladesystem servers to reduce the amount of fabric infrastructure needed in a datacentre.
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HP has formed a new division within its Enterprise Storage and Servers Group designed to unify its blade system development efforts.
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Red Hat has launched an online version of Command Center, its integrated server and application monitoring service. It also brings new features and a free evaluation version.
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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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Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. has released a test suite designed to enable IT managers to compare servers from different vendors on the basis of energy efficiency.
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HP and Microsoft combine forces to deliver some user-friendly features that take this early Windows Home Server box beyond mere network-attached storage.
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A new appliance and new software announced today by Cisco are designed to help business users improve application performance over networks.
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Hewlett-Packard Co has added to its HP-UX 11i v2 operating environment by extending data protection for its HP Integrity servers.
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Microsoft gives us an update on Windows Home Server
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The new Xandros Desktop Management Server software gives IT administrators the tools needed to roll out, configure and maintain mass deployments of Linux-equipped PCs.
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By MATTHEW FORDAHL     SAN JOSE, Calif.  -- New software at Hewlett-Packard Co...