HP evolves Adaptive Infrastructure into Converged Infrastructure 5 November, 2009 By Mark Cox

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"What we are doing here is announcing the evolution of our Adaptive Infrastructure strategy and evolving it to converged infrastructure," said Doug Oathout, vice president, Green IT and business development, HP Enterprise Storage Servers and Networking."This will facilitate the next generation data center."

This may come as news to Cisco, EMC and VMware, who also announced an important joint data center initiative this week based on best in class solutions that they see as taking the data center to the next level. But HP thinks it has a fair claim to making the best in class argument for itself -- without the need for any joined-at-the-hip partners to assist its' efforts.

"We are number one in servers, number one in storage, number two in networking, "Oathout said. "Our solutions are attractive to customers." HP believes it will win this competition because it has been on this path for years.

HP is pitching its data center play as the answer to customer concerns about unpredictability. New research conducted on behalf of HP by Coleman Parkes Research Ltd indicates that more than 90 percent of senior business decision makers believe business cycles will continue to be unpredictable in the next few years. Consequently, 80 percent recognize a need to be far more flexible in their approaches to business and technology.

The same research indicated that in addition to flexibility, 84% percent of senior business leaders believe innovation will be critical to their organization's success and 71 percent would sanction more technology investments if they could see how those investments met their organization's time-to-market and business opportunity needs.

HP is positing that the HP Converged Infrastructure can provide the flexibility needed here, increasing competitiveness and mitigating risk through business data management, information governance and business analytics, and driving time to revenue and reducing lost time, opportunity and effort through the best use of technology. Customers will be able to instantly adjust to dynamic business demands with a Converged Infrastructure.

Converged Infrastructure means simplifying IT by bringing the stacks together, converging virtualized compute, storage and networks with facilities into a single environment optimized for any workload. Inside, all resources and processes are controlled by a shared-services engine that provisions and adapts application environments to instantly respond to business demands

The Infrastructure Operating Environment is a shared-services engine that provisions and adapts application environments on the fly, to instantly respond to business demands, and accelerate the delivery of application environments. HP says this will allow it to deliver new services in minutes instead of months, and optimize infrastructure and resource utilization.

A key part of this will be HP's standards-based FlexFabric technology, which can connect thousands of servers to a virtualized, high performance and low-latency network that consolidates multiple protocols into a single fabric to dramatically lower network complexity and cost. HP emphasized that it is wire-once (unlike their competitors), dynamic assembly, and always predictable. It has flexibility to reduce cost and complexity, scales capacity to match application demand on the fly, and instantly migrates connections as applications move.

Another element of Converged Infrastructure Architecture are Virtual Resource pools, purpose-built systems able to create adaptive, shared capacity that can be combined, divided and repurposed to match any application demand faster and more efficiently. They increase total utilization and ensure resiliency and flexibility to support any application on any resource.

Finally the Data Center Smart Grid provides intelligent energy management by creating an intelligent, energy-aware environment throughout the entire data center, reducing energy costs and, increase facility capacity and life of the data center. It collects and communicates 1000's of power and cooling measurements across IT systems and facilities in real-time.

Supporting announcements included the new release of the HP Neoview enterprise data warehouse platform, HP Neoview Advantage, which supports real-time insight and decision-making, allowing customers to respond to business events faster. HP says this release offers dramatic improvements in performance, capacity, footprint and manageability. HP Neoview Advantage also reduces cost of ownership with industry-standard components and pre-built, pre-tested configurations optimized for warehousing.

Oathout said that while this is very high end stuff, the channel is critical to its success.

"The pieces of the converged infrastructure all go through channel partners now, and now they will be able to sell them all together," he said. "The software hook goes through the channel. A good majority of the revenue I care about goes through partners."