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Hewlett Packard

HP Launches New Cloud Software Solutions

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HP recently announced new software solutions that improve collaboration among application delivery teams, enabling organizations to accelerate business innovation and lower operational costs.

The new HP software solutions are key components to the HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) suite, which accelerates application delivery with a single platform, while enhancing collaboration among application delivery teams.

The HP solutions provide business analysts, developers and testers with visibility across the life cycle and new levels of automation to streamline the delivery process.

The new HP ALM software solutions include:

HP Service Virtualization 1.0

integrates with a broad set of application life cycle management solutions to reduce complexity and business risks. By accessing a simulated environment immediately, organizations can enhance performance testing of composite applications.

The simulated environment also eliminates the need to build a redundant test environment, access production systems or recreate a proxy to mimic service behaviors.

HP Application Lifecycle Intelligence (ALI)

is an enterprise technology agnostic solution that turns disparate data into actionable intelligence. HP ALI, combined with HP ALM 11, provides a real-time view into changes made to source code while allowing developers to work with the tools of their choice. This allows organizations to measure the impact of changes on requirements, tests and defects for a complete analysis of application quality prior to release.

HP Agile Accelerator 5.0

features a new scheduling tool for viewing deliverables in development and provides real-time visibility across the application life cycle for rapid response to changing business requirements.

AppSense’s User Virtualization Platform Selected For HP’s Client Virtualization Reference Architecture

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AppSense, provider of user virtualization solutions, today announced that its User Virtualization Platform is now a core building block of HP’s new Client Virtualization Reference Architecture.

Along with Microsoft, VMware and Citrix, AppSense User Virtualization has been recognized by HP as a crucial technology for a successful architecture that meets the goals for client virtualization.

With the HP Client Virtualization Reference Architecture, customers can achieve the goals of IT and workforce agility without compromising performance, operating costs, information security and user experience, which is AppSense’s area of focus.

AppSense User Virtualization is a software solution that enables user management across both physical and virtual desktops.

HP To Acquire 3PAR After Dell Walks Away From Bidding War

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The bidding war between HP and Dell for data storage company 3PAR is over.

The winner? Hewlett-Packard, with a $2.4 billion offer. That was 83 percent above Dell’s first offer and more than three times what 3Par stock was trading at then.

The only silver lining for Dell?

It is entitled to receive a $72 million break-up fee from 3PAR upon the termination of its merger agreement.

Make sure to read this good article from the AP following Dell’s withdrawal from the bidding war.

HP Announces Enhancements to its Business Service Automation Software Suite

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HP today announced new enhancements to its Business Service Automation (BSA) software suite to help customers better manage and reduce operational costs associated with virtualized data centers.

Enhancements within the HP BSA software suite include updated versions of:

  • HP Storage Essentials, a standards-based storage resource management software, helps customers manage the increased storage requirements of virtualized data centers by optimizing capacity allocation and utilization.
  • HP Operations Orchestration, a run book automation software that automates incident resolution, change orchestration and routine maintenance tasks in the data center. This new release allows customers to reduce operational costs by better provisioning and repurposing servers and storage without service downtime.

HP also launched HP BSA Essentials, an online community and subscription services offering that helps customers maximize the value of their HP BSA software investments.

HP Storage Essentials software helps customers lower costs for managing, visualizing and reporting on heterogeneous storage infrastructure. It can automatically baseline, configure and provision storage resources to match changes in virtual infrastructure. Using HP Storage Essentials, customers have reduced the amount of time required to provision storage by up to 90 percent.

New enhancements to HP Storage Essentials software help customers:

  • Optimize storage capacity allocation and utilization by allowing IT organizations to discover and map VMware hosts to storage and storage area network (SAN) dependencies. This enables IT staff to remove storage from virtual machines that are not being fully utilized, making it available to areas that need it most.
  • Improve storage administration efficiency and reduce task errors by automatically provisioning storage to a VMware hypervisor or guest operating system.
  • Deliver better business service visibility and automated change execution across application, server and storage domains through new integrations with HP Operations Orchestration workflow software and across the HP BSA software suite.

HP Operations Orchestration software saves customers time and money associated with managing routine IT operations by standardizing processes. The software automates incident resolution, change orchestration and maintenance tasks in the data center.

New enhancements to HP Operations Orchestration software help customers:

  • Provision and repurpose additional servers and storage capacity without service downtime through an automated workflow.
  • Reduce virtual server deployment time from hours to minutes through enhanced integration with the HP BSA suite.
  • Manage heterogeneous virtualization technologies with a single solution through new integrations with VMware Virtual Infrastructure, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V.

HP BSA Essentials helps customers maximize the benefits of automation and virtualization. The online portal connects customers to BSA Essentials Subscription Services and the BSA Essentials Community.

  • BSA Essentials Subscription Services provide access to security alerts and updates to regulation policy templates used for compliance auditing. This helps customers reduce risk by assessing and correcting security or policy violations that affect the technology infrastructure.
  • The BSA Essentials Community allows customers to find updated product information, share best practices and get new content, such as virtualization management workflows for HP Operations Orchestration software.

HP BSA Essentials is available now here. Access is available to HP BSA software customers with a current maintenance contract. HP Software Professional Services provides consulting services for BSA software to help customers maximize the value of their BSA virtualization solution.

HP Operations Orchestration and HP Storage Essentials software are available now from HP and select channel partners.

Cisco Plans Bold Move Into Server Business, Enters Arena With HP And IBM

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According to the NY Times, Cisco Systems is planning a big push into the server market, essentially entering into competition with its historical partners HP and IBM (who declined to comment on the story).

A risky move for Cisco, but a very interesting one.

The product — a server computer equipped with sophisticated virtualization software — is a bold but risky move by Cisco into an unfamiliar, intensely competitive market that typically produces far lower profits than Cisco makes from network gear. But it reflects the company’s ambition to grow beyond its roots as the so-called plumber of the Internet to offer everything from instant messaging software to digital stereos.

As The Register points out, VMware technology is likely the foundation of the virtualization part, since Cisco still owns part of the company (about 2%). Cisco is not disclosing any specifics though, but the NY Times learned that Cisco could show off the first of its new systems as early as March.

Acquisition rumors between Cisco Systems and VMware (and even EMC in full) are sure to flare up again.

A good follow-up article was published on Forbes.

Entire Line Of HP Thin Clients Now Certified for VMware View

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HP has announced that its entire line of thin clients is now certified for VMware View, making the products easier for customers to deploy in VMware environments. The certification includes rigorous testing and quality assurance with VMware View for enhanced reliability and ease of deployment.

HP is among the first in the industry to offer customers Linux thin clients certified for VMware View Manager, an enterprise desktop management server that enables IT administrators to quickly provision and tightly control user access. Additionally, HP is currently the only vendor to receive View Manager certification for Windows CE.

HP offers an extensive lineup of Windows and Linux-based thin clients suited for VMware View deployments that deliver a range of performance and features to support a wide variety of user needs – from basic data entry to advanced 3-D imaging and remote collaboration.

Windows-based HP thin clients certified for VMware View Manager, as well as HP ThinPro Linux products are available now at a starting price of $299. HP ThinConnect Linux-based thin clients certified for VMware View Manager are expected to be available Jan. 26, starting at $249.