HP enhances portfolio of data centre management software

Hewlett-Packard (HP) has announced new features for its suite of data centre management software. The improvements encompass both physical and virtual servers.

According to the company, the enhancements, which deal with resource allocation and disaster recovery in the data centre, will help businesses reduce costs and mitigate risk.

One aspect of the enhancements is aimed at making the resource allocation process in the data centre more efficient. According to Manish Mudgal, regional product business manager, HP Infrastructure Software, Hewlett-Packard Asia Pacific and Japan, the process of deploying new technology within the data centre usually takes between three to four months, including design, configuration, resource audit and equipment purchase.

HP's attempt at reducing the time taken for this process involves having a self-service portal, which contains 'best practices templates' used to deploy common applications such as SAP, Oracle and Exchange. The templates, which can be customised, contain information on the amount of infrastructure required to run various applications, as well as associated storage and network resources.

According to Mudgal, the software also keeps tabs of the amount of resources available in the data centre. “Administrators need only login to the portal, and select a template. If resources are not enough, emails will be triggered to relevant personnel to obtain the required resources.”

HP's offering would help accelerate IT deployment for instances such as companies who wished to open new branches as quickly as possible, said Mudgal.

This resource allocation enhancement is currently available in HP's ProLiant line of servers, and is scheduled to be available on the company's Integrity line of servers later this year.

The company also expanded its data centre capacity planning features to include servers from Dell, IBM and other Windows-based x86 servers. Virtual servers created from Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, VMware ESXi, VMware ESX and HP Integrity Virtual Machines are also supported.

Utilization data from such machines can be automatically collected and analyzed by HP's software, in order to 'maximize overall utilization rate for servers', said Mudgal.

Recovery

HP's latest addition to its current disaster recovery offerings allows for applications running on both physical and virtual servers, at a remote recovery site, to be restarted with 'a click of a button', according to Mudgal.