HP has announced enhancements to its Business Service Automation (BSA) software suite, intended to help companies better manage and reduce operational costs associated with virtualized data centers.
The widespread expansion of virtualization in the data center is presenting management challenges for companies, says Kalyan Ramanathan, director of product marketing for storage automation at HP. "The already complex IT service is becoming even more so with virtualization, and that leads to lots of automation challenges within the data center," he tells 5 Minute Briefing. "It is now much harder to make changes in the data center, it is much harder to manage the rate of change in the data center, and lastly and equally importantly, it is also very hard to manage compliance to best practice standards or to regulatory standards within the data center."
BSA provides a suite of products that enable customers to automate IT service and all the infrastructures within those IT services, Ramanathan explains. The enhanced offerings provide "significant new capabilities" to manage the virtualized infrastructure within the IT service.
Enhancements include an updated version of HP Storage Essentials, standards-based storage resource management software that helps companies manage the increased storage requirements of virtualized data centers. The tools optimize capacity allocation and utilization.
These new enhancements are intended to help customers optimize storage capacity allocation and utilization by allowing IT organizations to discover and map VMware hosts to storage and storage area network dependencies; improve storage administration efficiency and reduce task errors by automatically provisioning storage to a VMware hypervisor or guest operating system; as well as deliver better business service visibility and automated change execution across application, server and storage domains through new integrations with HP Operations Orchestration workflow software and across the HP BSA software suite.
HP also announced a new version of HP Operations Orchestration, runbook automation software that automates incident resolution, change orchestration and routine maintenance tasks in the data center. The new enhancements are designed to help customers provision and repurpose additional servers and storage capacity without service downtime, as well as reduce virtual server deployment time through enhanced integration with the BSA suite. The updated tools also are intended to help manage heterogeneous virtualization technologies with a single solution through new integrations with VMware Virtual Infrastructure, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft HyperV.
HP has also launched HP BSA Essentials, an online community and subscription services offering to help customers maximize the value of BSA software investments. Information about HP BSA Essentials can be found here. More information on HP Business Service Automation software is available here.