HP automates, simplifies IT to save companies millions of dollars in operational costs

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

HP Converged Infrastructure provides a blueprint for clients that want to eliminate sprawl, complexity and excess maintenance costs.

The introductions at HP Tech Forum include the most significant HP BladeSystem advancements in four years, including several new servers as well as innovations in HP Virtual Connect and HP BladeSystem Matrix. Also announced are unique power management technologies that automate energy awareness and control of IT systems across the data centre, as well as storage software that provides new levels of simplicity and automation through a single, unified architecture for data deduplication.

"Customers are asking for solutions that remove the layers of complexity and excess equipment that have sprawled across their environments so that IT can focus on innovation rather than operations" said Manoj Bhoola, Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking Country Manager, HP South Africa. "Today and throughout the year, HP is bolstering its Converged Infrastructure strategy with groundbreaking enterprise solutions across every area of the data centre, resulting in greater levels of simplification, performance and savings for our clients."

HP's ability to deliver these and other innovations on top of industry standards has driven customer confidence in HP ProLiant, as demonstrated in the company's market share leadership - a 56.1%market share in blade servers and 39.2% share in x86 servers, according to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker. (2)

Data-intensive enterprise workloads are driving a massive increase in scalability, reliability and performance requirements. To perform optimally, servers must have a balanced architecture across CPU, input/output (I/O) and memory.

Three new HP ProLiant scale-up servers deliver a number of innovations in automation that allow clients to speed application delivery, more effectively utilise IT resources and achieve improved return on investment. The rack-mount servers offer several industry firsts with memory footprints of up to 2 terabytes (TB) and "self-healing" capabilities that maximise application uptime with a 200% boost in availability. (3) Optimised for the most data-intensive workloads, the servers reduce data centre footprint, complexity and costs with a consolidation ratio up to 91-to-1.

Seven new HP ProLiant G7 server blades address the most demanding virtualisation environments by offering the industry's first blade with 1 TB of memory and integrated 10Gb Virtual Connect FlexFabric technology for I/O scalability. With an architecture that balances processor performance, expanded memory and I/O capacity, these systems can support up to four times more virtual machines than competitive blades, while requiring 66% less hardware. (4)

The explosive growth of virtual machines has increased the complexity and cost of connecting servers to networks and storage. The expanded HP Virtual Connect portfolio delivers automated, wire-once connectivity to any network, eliminating up to 95% of sprawl at the network edge.

The new HP Virtual Connect FlexFabric module is a single device that connects servers to any Fibre Channel, Ethernet and iSCSI network. This eliminates the need for multiple interconnects. With HP Virtual Connect FlexFabric technology, now built into HP ProLiant G7 server blades, clients can eliminate up to $185 000 in network equipment costs per rack. (5)

With more than 3 million ports delivered, HP Virtual Connect sales in the first half of HP's fiscal 2010 have doubled over the same period last year. HP Virtual Connect lets clients rapidly reconfigure connections to LANs and SANs transparently by moving workloads or adding and replacing servers on the fly.

With manual deployment of applications and infrastructure, it takes weeks or even months to deliver new services to the business. Clients need an automated IT environment to rapidly respond to business change.

HP BladeSystem Matrix software, through new integration with HP Server Automation, simplifies IT environments with one-touch, self-service provisioning of applications. The industry's first "all inclusive" converged infrastructure offering, HP BladeSystem Matrix enables private clouds by allowing clients to deploy complex IT environments in minutes. (6) As a result, clients can reduce their total cost of ownership up to 56 percent compared to traditional IT infrastructures. (6)

"Our success depends on our ability to deliver reliable, high-quality IT services, so that we can respond to fluctuations in demand without disrupting operations and bolster business growth," Merritte Stidston, director, Development Centre Strategy & Operations, McKesson - Office of the Chief Technology Officer. "HP BladeSystem Matrix provides a self-service, template-based portal using McKesson and HP system best practices, that allows us to quickly provision blades - 90 this year - within a minute each. This ability gives us consistent and repeatable results, which saves my team precious time to accomplish other tasks while reducing build errors."

HP Intelligent Power Discovery: Eliminates over-provisioning in the data centre. Accurate and timely power usage data and control can save companies millions of dollars in data centre energy costs.

HP Intelligent Power Discovery is an industry-first advancement for green data centres that creates an automated, energy-aware network between HP ProLiant servers, (7) third-party facility management tools and data centre power grids. Expanding on Data Centre Smart Grid solutions, 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, clients can extend the lives of their data centres and save up to $5 million per every 1 000 servers in one year. (8)

Deduplication reduces costs by eliminating multiple stored versions of the same data. The industry's first-generation offerings required clients to utilise multiple processes and multiple products to support different applications and platforms.

HP StoreOnce is the industry's first solution to automate data deduplication across the enterprise with a single unified architecture. By eliminating the complexity of multiple deduplication processes and products, HP StoreOnce improves productivity and data management efficiency. Built on patented innovation designed by HP Labs, the company's research arm, this new class of deduplication software delivers up to 20% improvement in performance (9) and more than twice the price/performance ratio of a leading competitive offering. (10)

Now available with HP's line of D2D backup systems, including the new HP D2D4312, HP StoreOnce enables clients to spend up to 95 percent less on storage capacity.(9) Available within virtual appliances, backup clients and scale-out storage systems, HP StoreOnce provides clients a single solution for all their deduplication needs.

More information about these products and HP at Technology Forum is available at www.hp.com/go/TechForum2010.