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Red Hat, HP Optimize RH Enterprise Virtualization for HP BladeSystem Matrix

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Red Hat and HP today expanded their collaboration to drive the next generation of converged server, storage and networking infrastructure solutions with the launch of open source software designed to improve administrator productivity, lower costs and maximize resource utilization.

Yesterday, Red Hat announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, the foundation of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio of solutions. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 is now available on HP BladeSystem and HP ProLiant servers. With this combination, customers can take advantage of an open source, standards-based virtual infrastructure that provides scalability and security capabilities. Additionally, enterprises will be able to leverage management capabilities offered by both companies. In the future, customers can expect increasing levels of management integration between the system and operating environment to further drive administrator productivity.

The HP BladeSystem Matrix is a “cloud infrastructure in a box” that brings the economics, scalability and response times of the cloud to diverse applications across customers` data centers.

Customers can obtain increased performance improvement and cost savings by deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss Enterprise Middleware on HP ProLiant G6 platforms. They also can get a single point of accountability for the purchase and support of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on HP systems. With its comprehensive range of world-class support services, HP offers customers complete confidence to grow their businesses while controlling costs.

VMware And HP Enhance Partnership

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VMware announced that it signed an OEM agreement to integrate HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping software into the VMware vCenter suite and is also working with HP on new datacenter management initiatives.

In addition, HP has integrated VMware ThinApp with the HP Client Automation policy-based management platform. Both of these initiatives will help customers seamlessly and cost-effectively manage their physical and virtual datacenter and desktop initiatives. Today’s announcement expands on the companies’ existing strong relationship designed to provide customers with complete solutions that help them build and manage dynamic datacenters for delivering IT as a service.

In the first area of collaboration, VMware will OEM the HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping software into the VMware vCenter management suite. VMware will integrate HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping software as a virtual appliance into VMware vCenter ConfigControl in 2010 after ConfigControl becomes available to further enable customers to maintain visibility and ensure compliance of configuration states in their VMware vSphere 4 environments. A combined solution will give VMware vCenter administrators “single pane of glass” visualization of how business services running in VMware virtual machines map to the physical infrastructure. This will enable customers to simplify management of their heterogeneous infrastructures through comprehensive discovery and dependency mapping as well as automation of common management tasks including change detection, configuration updates, provisioning, patching, and enforcement of compliance and security policies.

VMware has also worked with HP to extend the HP Client Automation policy-based management platform to support VMware ThinApp. This enables customers to standardize on a single client management solution to publish, deploy, track and report on virtualized applications along with physical applications. Customers can use the distributed infrastructure and preconfigured templates available in HP Client Automation software to manage VMware ThinApp’s new management functionality, decreasing infrastructure requirements and simplifying overall manageability. Customers can also use reports generated by HP Client Automation software to track virtual and physical applications for tighter asset management.

As a result of this enhanced collaboration and co-development, the two companies plan to jointly develop go-to-market and sales programs that leverage both companies’ direct and channel sales forces.

Netuitive Brings Predictive Analytics to HP Business Service Management Console

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Netuitive, a provider of self-learning performance management software, today announced it has integrated its predictive analytics capabilities with HP Business Service Management (BSM) technology for an automated and adaptive BSM solution. Netuitive is now a Gold Enterprise Management Application Partner of HP’s and has been invited to join the HP Software Marketplace Referral Program.

Netuitive helps customers increase the value of their existing BSM tools. Business users benefit from increased service availability and avoidance of revenue loss and end-user productivity loss, while IT is better equipped to identify and act upon problems before affecting the end user. Both business and IT users benefit with a unified BSM toolset that enables successful BSM implementations and provides a better understanding of how IT operations and infrastructure performance affect business services.

At a more granular level, the combination of Netuitive’s automated performance management technology and HP’s leading BSM technology addresses common IT operational issues. These include too many fragmented domain tools; the inability to prioritize issues based on business impact; and, slow, inefficient problem identification and resolution processes.

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.

IBM Walks Away From Talks Over Potential Sun Acquisition

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IBM has withdrawn its $7 billion bid for Sun Microsystems today (Sunday), reports the NY Times, who confirmed the collapse of the talks based on a statement from an unnamed source while several other media, including the Wall Street Journal and ZDNet, were still speculating. The New York Times correctly points out this leaves Sun free to pursue other opportunities for selling itself.

Since last year, Sun executives had been meeting with potential buyers. I.B.M. stepped up, seeing an opportunity to add to its large software business, acquire valuable researchers and consolidate the market for larger, so-called server computers that corporations use in their data centers.

In their talks, I.B.M. and Sun had a contract to deal with each other exclusively. Now, Sun is free to pursue other suitors, including I.B.M. rivals like Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems. Cisco recently entered the market for server computers.

It will be interesting to watch the market react to this on Monday morning.

LeftHand Networks Delivers Entry-level SAN for Virtualized Environments

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LeftHand Networks (an HP company) today announced an entry-level storage area network (SAN) solution that improves performance and reduces storage costs within virtualized server environments for midsize businesses.

The LeftHand SAS Starter SAN helps customers efficiently deploy their first virtualization projects by simplifying the process of creating, accessing and managing shared storage resources.
As customers deploy virtual server environments, they frequently encounter unforeseen system performance bottlenecks. To further complicate matters, server virtualization increases the number of required connections to a SAN. This increased system complexity makes it more difficult and costly to troubleshoot when bottlenecks do occur. The LeftHand SAS Starter SAN reduces costs and mitigates these performance issues by automatically balancing data volumes across all disk drives, network connections and processors.
The SAS Starter SAN includes management tools that provide replication, thin provisioning and snapshot capabilities. These capabilities help ensure data availability even as the environment becomes more complex. In addition, customers can purchase only the capacity they need, easily increasing both the capacity and performance of their system without experiencing any disruption. The SAS Starter SAN can scale to more than 80 network ports and 320 disk drives to accommodate business growth.
LeftHand also introduced a higher capacity SATA Starter SAN that offers a 25 percent reduction in the cost per gigabyte (GB) of disk drive capacity than the previous generation. The solution’s storage capacity has increased 33 percent to 12 terabytes (TB) while maintaining its current list price. The SATA Starter SAN is ideal for customers who want to consolidate storage for Microsoft Windows or Linux servers.
The SAS Starter SAN and the higher-capacity SATA Starter SAN are available immediately through LeftHand Networks’ resellers and value-added resellers in the United States as well as value-added distributors throughout Europe.
Pricing starts at $35,000 for the 4.8 TB SAS Starter SAN and $30,000 for the 12 TB SATA Starter SAN.