HP holds Tech Forum 2010: Transform, converge, innovate

MANILA, Philippines - Hewlett-Packard took center stage in Las Vegas recently as the company held its annual mega-event at the world-famous Mandalay Bay Hotel. The HP Technology Forum 2010 saw new products and services that support “Converged Infrastructure,” HP’s blueprint for the future data center.

The company launched a slew of new servers, storage and networking gear that will help converge and streamline IT infrastructure, operations, and management so that enterprises and businesses can spend less time, money and effort on maintenance.

By combining Converged Infrastructure with advanced virtualization and microchip technologies, businesses can reduce a traditional 20-server room to a one-server rack, saving them millions on what they would normally spend using the old hardware and technologies.

HP’s refreshed ProLiant G7 server and blade lines include seven blade systems and three rack-mount servers, some of which are powered by the latest Xeon 7500 Series “Nehalem EX” chips from Intel. The rack-mount servers offer up to two terabytes (TB) of memory while the new server blades support up to 1TB of memory.

Also unveiled were power management technologies that automate energy awareness and control of IT systems across the data center, as well as storage software that provides new levels of simplicity and automation through a unified architecture for data management.

Blades and servers

Seven new HP ProLiant G7 server blades deal with the most demanding virtualization environments by offering the industry’s first blade with 1TB of memory and integrated 10GB Virtual Connect FlexFabric technology for I/O scalability. These systems can support up to four times more virtual machines than competitive blades while requiring 66 percent less hardware.

On the other hand, three new HP ProLiant scale-up servers allow clients to speed up application delivery, use IT resources optimally, and achieve improved return on investment. These rack-mount servers offer several industry firsts, including memory footprints of up to 2TB and “self-healing” capabilities that maximize application uptime with a 200 percent boost in availability.

Convergence and innovation

Included in the new servers are greater automation options and self-healing capabilities. For example, “virtual machine isolation” capabilities allow users to isolate a virtual machine with a problem and automatically repair it without bringing down the physical server and other virtual machines.

HP’s Virtual Connect technology is designed to automate the process of connecting servers to networks and storage. Enterprises can reconfigure connections to LANs and storage-area networks (SANs) by moving workloads or adding and replacing servers on the fly, for instance.

The Virtual Connect FlexFabric technology is now built into the ProLiant G7 server blades. The latest module is a 10GB, 24-port device that connects BladeSystem server blades to any fiber channel, Ethernet, and iSCSI network, eliminating the need for multiple interconnects.

Meanwhile, the HP BladeSystem Matrix software, through new integration with HP Server Automation, simplifies IT environments with one-touch, self-service provisioning of applications. The BladeSystem Matrix enables private clouds by allowing clients to deploy complex IT environments in minutes, thereby reducing their total cost of ownership up to 56 percent compared to traditional IT infrastructure.

The new version of Matrix also features automated storage tiering, which assigns storage based on application performance and availability requirements.

On the power management front, HP unveiled the Intelligent Power Discovery software that can collect and analyze data related to power usage from sources across the data center. With this software, clients can view a real-time, graphical map of energy usage across servers and facilities.

It likewise provides a view of each server’s physical location, the server rack, and an analysis of power, thermal and electrical configurations. The software can automatically verify power redundancy and identify equipment connections to prevent errors and potential circuit overloads.

The new HP StoreOnce deduplication architecture, on the other hand, eliminates the complexity of multiple deduplication processes and products to improve productivity and data management efficiency.

DreamWorks looks to HP for next-gen networking infra

Also at the Forum, the film studio that produced Shrek, Madagascar, and Kung Fu Panda announced its selection of HP networking solutions to improve its data center infrastructure performance and reliability.

DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc. rigorously tested the full range of HP Networking products, including the enterprise HP A12500 data center switch, when it reviewed the products it needed to update and refresh its existing network infrastructure.

With HP’s advanced networking technology, DreamWorks hopes to reduce network complexity, achieve increased port capacity, and significantly reduce power consumption and costs.

Key to DreamWorks’ implementation is the HP Intelligent Management Center (IMC), which is expected to ease network management throughout the studio’s data center migration and simplify the management of its expanding network.