HP drives converged infrastructure

The way enterprises configure IT systems today will not be manageable in the future.

This was the key message from Martin Riley, HP Enterprise Storage and Servers software marketing manager for Europe, Middle East and Africa, during yesterday's HP Converged Infrastructure Roadshow in Westcliff.

Riley told ITWeb that HP is making significant investments into its converged infrastructure strategy.

He said the explosion of growth in data, applications and complex infrastructure is driving a trend where enterprises are moving towards shared services by aggregating applications and infrastructure to work in real-time.

“The promise of converged infrastructure is to free the data centre from the constraints of hard wiring, and silos within the network,” noted Riley. “Infrastructure needs to be adaptable, virtualised, optimised and resilient across thousands of devices.”

Riley explained: “If you look at what's happened in the past five years, there's been a lot of work around virtualisation of the server. But we still don't really have virtualisation across the entire infrastructure and that's where technology is going. Any enterprise over the next two to three years will have to do this and scale up as new applications come in.”

Riley suggested that typically, an enterprise's IT department spends between 80% and 90% on simply keeping its systems running, and only 20% invested in innovation. He said HP has changed this figure to 70% on keeping systems running, and 30% on innovation.

Trevor Bell, HP StorageWorks pre-sales consultant, pointed out that the explosive data growth, fuelled by digital media, has impacted the way in which enterprises manage and procure storage. He said data retention has become more critical because of legal and compliance issues.

“Data is doubling every 18 months. In 2007, there were six billion gigabytes (GB) of video stored, this will increase to 16 billion GB by 2011,” said Bell. “By 2012, the amount of unstructured data captured is going to surpass that of structured data.”

Bell says unstructured data is forcing IT departments to deploy systems with larger capacities, which can massively scale up. He added that virtualised storage infrastructure will become a bigger player in this space to optimise capacity non-disruptively and to integrate all of the applications and data.