HP Announces Converged Infrastructure

HP announced its converged infrastructure solution consisting of virtualized servers, storage, networks and power and cooling. These components will be wrapped by end-to-end management software which will reportedly allow organizations to scale up or down depending on their changing needs, claimed the vendor. HP currently has about six customers using this infrastructure.

Durgadutt Nedungadi, Director- Enterprise Server and Storage, HP TSG said, "Through HP's research we have found that 70 percent of power consumed in the datacenter is used to cool it, rather than running it. Through HP's 'Dynamic Infrastructure' we now have utilities that can shift this power to running the datacenter." Quoting IDC's research he added that this year virtualized servers are set to overtake the number of physical servers deployed in the country.

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The vendor claims its converged infrastructure comes with features such as virtualization, resiliency and provides optimized usage along with modular technology. Outlining what the converged infrastructure architecture would consist of, Nedungadi said, "The architecture would consist of an infrastructure operating environment, flex fabric, adaptive resource pools and a datacenter smart grid. Adaptive resource pools help customers search for resources across multiple datacenters, so re-use of existing resources becomes possible."

Cisco along with EMC had launched a similar solution called the 'Unified Computing' about six months ago. However, Nedungadi maintained that the HP solution was differentiated by the fact that it takes a holistic view of a customers needs, from business to application to infrastructure.

The vendor aims to go directly to the market and through its partners, while concentrating on the enterprise segment initially. Training programs for the same are being conducted. HP aims at selling the solution by holding visioning workshops, PoC and planning services among others. Commenting on the costs involved in a virtual environment, Nedungadi said, "The cost is currently high as there isn't proper management software available, and investing in this is crucial. There is not much incremental cost involved though there is effort required to shift from a silo to a converged environment."