SHANGAI: Its all about managing and that’s exactly what Hewlett-Packard had chosen for its Asia Pacific 2003 conference theme, ‘Art of Control’. With storage requirements almost doubling every year and growing complex with multiple vendor platforms, HP demonstrated its Adaptive Enterprise strategy, which according to the company is the only means to better manage IT infrastructure and scale up for future requirements without much of change and investments.

"Adaptive Enterprise is the next wave in IT and it is growing from being just a support function of any industry to becoming a key business enabler. With growing pressure on business performance and time-to-market, it can provide customers with better control over business and infrastructure. The key words are adaptability, scalability, extensible and agile service," said HP’s Enterprise Storage and Servers, Vice President for Asia Pacific, Mike Muller.

Adaptive Enterprise stresses on the need of ‘demand more’ instead of `on demand’. According to him, when business is growing and expanding because of new relationships, tie-ups and mergers, companies can better utilize their existing IT infrastructure as also synchronize with other solutions.

"We got a chance to understand this better during our merger with Compaq. We had put together more than 1,000 sites, 900 plus web servers, 7,000 applications, 26 million emails and 30 million business transactions—all giving birth to the Adaptive Enterprise," said Muller. "Adaptive Enterprise strategy was able to consolidate everything under a single umbrella within nine months."

According to the company’s Network Storage Solutions Senior Vice President and General Manager for Asia Pacific Bob Schultz, "HP builds on ENSA with Adaptive Enterprise concept, which gives more control, extensibility and agility in business over a range of architecture, technology, solutions and infrastructure."

Ernst & Young (Australia, Malaysia & Hong Kong) MIS Senior Manager Wong Kum Wai who was also present during the occasion also highlighted the importance of Adaptive Enterprise and storage strategy. Talking about the E&Y needs he said that the company was presently managing three terabytes of data that has been growing at 30 percent rate every year.

"Similarly, our back-up demand has also been increasing and we had to spend hours on manually downloading it into the drives. After reviewing storage solutions of various vendors, we implemented SAN with HP, which is addressing all our requirements and provides maximum utilization of existing infrastructure using dynamic storage concept."

The result: E&Y has managed to reduce its resource and infrastructure management by 37.5 percent and has also automated all its tape drives into tape libraries connecting to LAN and SAN with single solution.

The event also saw Microsoft demonstrate its Windows Storage Server 2003, being brought out in association with HP. Microsoft entered storage space last year by forming a separate enterprise storage division in January 2002. "Windows Storage Server works with SAN to provide data protection and recovery to the customers and we are bringing many solutions in this space, in association with HP," said HP’s Enterprise Management and Storage Division General Manager, Chris Philips.

"China and India are the fastest growing markets for storage in Asia Pacific region and although, most of the storage happens in DAS, companies have started moving into network storage solutions. Presently, around 15 percent of the companies have gone for network storage and in that 80 percent-85 percent happened in the Windows environment. BFSI and telecom are the most happening segments in storage and in some cases government and manufacturing are doing well," said an official from IDC.

(Cyber News Service)