HP today announced an overhaul of its hardware portfolio, claiming its new offerings will improve the agility of businesses and enable faster cloud computing implementations.
Convergence is the name of the game, with all of HP's enhancements based on pulling together different strands of the business. The new Converged Systems line offers a mixture of hardware, software and consulting the company claims will greatly speed up the time it takes for new applications to be up and running.
The new Converged Storage range integrates HP Store360 scale-out software with HP BladeSystem and HP ProLiant hardware to reduce storage administration and speed time to service delivery. It will also be adding new Storage Consulting services.
Finally, the new Converged Data Center has been designed to offer users what the company claims is a new class of Performance Optimised Data Centres. HP claims it can all be deployed in weeks and at a fraction of the cost of traditional data centres. Also, as is often the case these days, the new type of data centre is said to be far more energy efficient, using 95 per cent less energy, according to HP.
Dave Chalmers, chief technology officer (CTO) for HP UK, said the new products would meet the demands of start-ups through to service providers, with differences in the software being offered.
He said the key to these offerings was the way they were packaged for users.
"We've taken HP hardware, the software stack under a single pane of management and applied that to the cloud," siad Chalmers.
There has been a notable increase in these type of turnkey packages as a means to boost cloud computing. The most obvious of these has been the Cisco/EMC/VMware offering Vblock. However, Chalmers said flexibility and choices were the main differentiators for HP compared to the vBlock offering.
"If you go with vBlock, then you have no choice of hypervisor or storage," he added. "The way we offer converged services is to be more open - you can have a choice of Hyper-V or VMware - if you prefer another vendor's storage to EMC, you can have that too."
"Throughout it all we can be flexible and suggest the option that best fits in with your business. Everything has been designed around open standards and open systems, that's key for us"
The products are set to be rolled out over the next quarter, said Chalmers.
