HP delivers Converged Infra Architecture

BANGALORE, INDIA: HP today unveiled the HP Converged Infrastructure Architecture and associated services and partner offerings that provide a blueprint for chief information officers to create elasticity in their technology environments, supporting innovation in their businesses.

Today, only 34 percent of typical IT budgets are dedicated to business innovation. This is because the proliferation of IT sprawl has created technology silos in data centers that consume up to 66 percent of the technology budget for maintenance and operations. Solving the issue of IT sprawl is expected to create a $35 billion market opportunity for converged infrastructure solutions by 2012.

The HP Converged Infrastructure enables data center environments that allow organizations to focus on innovation and making technology a key differentiator for their businesses. It integrates existing silos of compute, storage, network and facility resources with unified management to deliver a virtualized, highly automated technology environment. With pools of shared services that can be leveraged on the fly, businesses increase the flexibility of their environments and speed time to application value.

In a related advance, HP has extended the HP BladeSystem Solution Builder program to enable additional independent software vendors to build solutions that customers can quickly deploy and easily manage in a converged infrastructure.

“Companies are asking HP to help them thrive in unpredictability by using technology to rapidly meets the needs of their business,” said Durgadutt Nedungadi, Director Sales, Enterprise Business, HP India. “HP Converged Infrastructure is the answer and only HP, with its market-leading technology, intellectual property, expertise and partner ecosystem, can deliver it today.”

The HP Converged Infrastructure eliminates technology silos and complexity in the data center while leveraging current technology investments. Through unified management, all assets become part of a resource pool that can be divided, assembled and changed to dynamically align to any business, workload or application need. The use of these resources is optimized across the infrastructure, allowing companies to improve utilization, lower energy use and reduce costs.

The new HP Converged Infrastructure Architecture delivers a number of technology innovations providing:

Increased business agility through on-the-fly delivery of shared services

The new HP Infrastructure Operating Environment reduces complexity by taking application-specific processes and tools and transforming them into a standardized, shared environment. Governance through policy-based management and automated, template-driven application deployment significantly speeds time to business value. Complementary products include the enhanced HP Insight Dynamics, HP Insight Control and HP Business Technology Optimization solutions.

Dramatically lower costs and complexity with a wire-once network fabric

HP FlexFabric integrates thousands of servers and storage resources into a single virtualized, high-performance and low-latency network fabric. Built on industry standards, FlexFabric is highly scalable and can consolidate multiple protocols. For the first time, network connections and capacity can be fully virtualized from the edge to the core.

Optimized resource utilization for any application or workload

HP Virtual Resource Pools virtualize shared server, storage and networking resources to provide an easy to manage, cost-effective, shared-service environment. As a result, administrators can easily call upon any technology service in the pool in real time to support changing business requirements. HP Virtual Resource Pools enable customers to maximize resources, while increasing scalability, flexibility and utilization of technology assets across their infrastructures.

Improved energy efficiency and management across the data center

HP Data Center Smart Grid delivers an intelligent, energy-aware environment across technology infrastructures and data center facilities. For the first time, businesses can accurately visualize, monitor and control energy use in real time. With HP Data Center Smart Grid, companies can set policies for energy use based on accurate data and monitor their ongoing performance to ensure compliance with internal, environmental or government regulations and goals.

Embodying all of the attributes of the HP Converged Infrastructure Architecture, the HP BladeSystem Matrix has allowed Dubai Airport, UAE, www.dubaiairports.ae, one of world’s fastest growing airports, to turn technology from a cost center to a profit generator.