HP has announced a series of integrated solutions intended to simplify operations and accelerate IT resource consolidation, enabling clients to streamline their delivery of mission-critical application services to the business. The solutions include the next generation HP StorageWorks P9500 Disk Array and enhancements to the HP-UX portfolio for Integrity systems.
IT sprawl is taking business performance "to the breaking point," making the provisioning of resources for new applications needed by the business extremely costly and complex, Katie Curtin-Mestre, director of software planning and marketing for HP Business Critical Systems, tells 5 Minute Briefing. As a result, she says, large portions of IT budgets are being used for operations and maintenance - with about only about a third being used to drive innovation and business advancement.
HP's converged infrastructure strategy is designed to help customers deal with this IT sprawl by breaking down the siloed IT model and evolving to an IT model that is very application-centric, since applications "power the business" are ultimately what the business owners care about, she adds.
The new HP StorageWorks P9500 Disk Array and enhancements to the HP-UX portfolio for Integrity systems are designed to improve application service delivery by providing an open, integrated architecture for the most demanding workloads, virtually anywhere and at any time, according to HP.
Building on five generations of HP StorageWorks XP Disk Array technology, HP StorageWorks expanded its support of mission-critical applications with the new HP StorageWorks P9500 Disk Array that provides continuous access to crucial data with minimal application downtime. "There is absolutely a requirement - and it never goes away - for customers in large enterprises, to make sure they have a system that is always on and available for them," notes Lee Johns, director of marketing, HP StorageWorks.
The StorageWorks 9500 Disk Array employs HP P9000 Application Performance Extender software to consolidate storage for applications and virtual machines on a single array. In addition, HP P9000 Smart Tiers software provides automated movement of data between classes of storage capacity - including solid-state drives - to balance performance and cost with business requirements. The disk array also includes an improved user interface with enhancements to HP Remote Web Console, which HP says can simplify deployment of a storage infrastructure and reduce management time by 40% to 60%.
HP also announced software enhancements to the latest release of its UNIX operating system, HP-UX 11i v3, as well as to the HP Serviceguard Solutions portfolio. The new stack includes tools that are intended to help clients significantly cut manual configuration efforts for applications, employing the new HP Serviceguard Extension for Oracle E-Business Suite software. The solution provides automated configuration for more than 200 integrated applications, including financial services, customer relationship management applications and interrelated components such as storage and networking.
HP also announced new migration tools, including a new HP-UX Porting Kit for AIX, and HP-UX 9000 Container virtualization technology intended to help companies to more rapidly consolidate legacy applications running on HP 9000 to HP Integrity systems.
Information is available from HP on the new HP StorageWorks P9500 Disk Array and enhancements to the HP-UX portfolio.