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HP target data centre pains

The IT vendor wants to capitalise on increasing environmental and capacity pressures felt by IT organisations in a raft of new data centre services and software announcements.

By Miya Knights, 17 Mar 2008 at 13:39

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HP today unveiled new software and services it claims will ease the challenges faced by CIOs - such as power shortages - in managing their data centres.

Ann Livermore, executive vice president of HP's Technology Solutions Group, said the new offerings would build on HP's existing server and storage hardware business, and its IT service management software portfolio.

"We are supporting the data centre transformation process of moving from silos of individual servers, storage and networks to an IT environment available 24 hours a day that operates as a single, virtual infrastructure," she said.

HP is moving to improve its services for the data centre. In tough economic times, "outsourcing services tend to be cyclical," said Livermore. "So data centre consolidation, virtualisation and orchestration services will look to capitalise on this trend."

HP Critical Facilities Services - based on HP's acquisition last month of provider EYP Mission Critical Facilities - will focus on consulting, and power and space-efficient design.

HP's Adaptive Infrastructure as a Service (AlaaS) will package up services, software and hardware as an outsourced service using HP owned and managed data centres. Initially, HP will offer AlaaS as an optimised platform for Microsoft Exchange and SAP applications.

HP said it had adapted technology originally used for UNIX environments to lower-cost, x86 architectures. This software will allow the real-time capacity planning, performance monitoring and management of physical and virtual servers through one single interface, the vendor claims. HP has also now added power utilisation monitoring to its management software.

Research carried out by Penn, Schoen and Berland found that data centres will continue to be a key battleground in the war on data proliferation, growing energy and maintenance costs and increased environmental pressures.

One third of CIOs or chief executives surveyed by the company believed their data centre would not be able to satisfy their company's needs by 2010.

Moreover, 86 per cent said current data centre capacities would only be adequate in the short term, while 88 per cent said valuable time and resources is currently spent on inefficiently maintenance and management of data centres.