HP Bundles Data-Center Services in Name of Efficiency

Survey shows one third of CIOs say unwieldy growth of data centers is a major issue

• By Michael Domingo
• 03/19/2008

A report commissioned by Hewlett-Packard Company earlier this year suggests that a major issue for a third of the CIOs surveyed is unwieldy growth of data centers in the next two to five years, particularly as the number of business services and applications that are deployed through them continues to head skyward.

With managing that growth in mind, HP has been at work on an initiative to make data centers run more efficiently. This week, it announced a bundling of a number of its technology products and services into what it calls the HP Data Center Transformation portfolio. The announcement was made at the company's Technology@Work 2008 conference taking place this week in Barcelona, Spain.

The portfolio cuts across a wide swath of HP's products and services. A big part of managing the data center is HP's Critical Facilities services, which comes out of HP's acquisition of EYP Mission Critical Facilities announced in November. It's primarily a consulting service that provides strategic planning and operations support for large-scale data centers.

The keys to the portfolio, though, are design, support and training enhancements to HP's Data Center Virtualization services, which allow enterprise admins to manage any manner of virtualized environment from storage to servers to applications.

To manage both physical and virtualized data center environments, the portfolio includes a version of the company's Insight Manager, dubbed HP Insight Dynamics-VSE, which is specially tuned to support a myriad of hypervisor technologies and can be used for capacity planning as data center needs grow. Finally, HP Operations Orchestration has undergone some refining to automate and audit data-center processes.

HP is also introducing a new option that allows customers to buy into data-center services rather than having to spend a large chunk on capital expenses. According to the company, HP's Adaptive Infrastructure as a Service (AIaaS), provides customers with a way to buy into data-center-sized application deployments as a managed service.

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