HP has introduced new services and solutions based on HP Converged Infrastructure to enable service providers and enterprises to more quickly deliver cloud services.
With the new offerings, HP is responding to the increasing pressures that business of all sizes are facing to deliver IT services on-demand, Frances Guida, manager of HP Cloud Solutions and Infrastructure, Enterprise Servers, Storage, and Networking, tells 5 Minute Briefing. With the proliferation of technologies such as smartphones, and the changing expectations of the workforce regarding system latency, there is a tension in enterprises to deliver "instant gratification," says Guida. And so, she notes, customers are turning to new delivery models to enable services to be delivered in a much more self service, on-demand fashion.
However, there are things that get in the way of low latency, according to Guida. Legacy data centers, rigid IT architectures and technology sprawl present barriers to implementing new delivery models such as IT-as-a-service and cloud computing. As a result, HP is introducing new technologies and services to allow organizations to break the process down and get started in addressing their challenges.
The new offerings include HP Technology Consulting Services, which will seek to help enterprises accelerate planning, design and building of cloud data centers by up to 40% while driving alignment between IT, facility operations and the business. The services offering includes data center strategy services, data center operations services, and data center continuity services. "We have IP built into each of those pillars that our consultants can draw upon," explains Flynn Maloy, senior director of worldwide marketing of technology services for HP. The services will help organizations design their data center or data centers for a "true cloud environment," Maloy notes, so that it has the density, scalability, and the price points in terms of automation, and power and cooling that allow them to deliver the cloud environment they want to their customers.
In addition, HP has expanded the ecosystem around its platform for customers who are looking to deploy cloud services, and added financing and consulting services to that offering. HP CloudSystem portfolio includes financing, services, developer resources and 100 new HP Cloud Centers of Excellence worldwide - 50 in the Asia Pacific and Japan region. These centers enable clients to use HP CloudSystem, an integrated and open platform for building and managing services across private, public and hybrid cloud environments.
And finally, for customers that want to get to a cloud infrastructure but are looking at more of a building-block approach, HP has introduced a set of packaged configurations for virtualization, which is an on-ramp to cloud. HP VirtualSystem for Microsoft and HP VirtualSystem for Superdome 2/HP-UX are new turnkey hardware and software solutions for deploying virtualized application environments. According to HP, by using tailored consulting and HP Support services, clients can deploy standardized blocks of applications for thousands of users in hours versus months.
Additional information is available at www.hp.com/go/HPCloudInnovation.