HP Announces New Mission-Critical Solutions To Simplify, Consolidate Technology Environments

PALO ALTO, Calif.(BUSINESS WIRE) HP today announced integrated solutions that simplify operations and accelerate IT resource consolidation, enabling clients to streamline their delivery of mission-critical application services. Chief information officers must ensure high availability of their most critical applications while simplifying management of the technology infrastructure and reducing costs. The new HP StorageWorks P9500 Disk Array and enhancements to the HP-UX portfolio for Integrity systems improve application service delivery by providing an open, integrated architecture for the most demanding workloads, virtually anywhere and at any time.

"Enterprises need to simplify their technology environments and reduce overall costs, but cannot afford to sacrifice reliability, availability or security of mission-critical applications," said David Roberson, senior vice president and general manager, StorageWorks, HP. "The HP Converged Infrastructure breaks down costly and inefficient technology silos to reduce complexity and improve resiliency."

The new P9500 builds on five generations of HP StorageWorks XP Disk Array technology. With a new user-centric design and standards-based architecture, the P9500 increases the amount of data managed per administrator and doubles power efficiency while cutting data center floor space requirements in half.

Application-level quality of service controls enable clients to efficiently use and share storage resources while enabling the delivery of mission-critical service-level agreements. A fact sheet on the HP StorageWorks P9500 is available here.Client benefits include:
    * Reduced total cost of ownership using HP P9000 Application Performance Extender software to consolidate storage for mission-critical applications and virtual machines on a single array.
    * Increased efficiency and flexibility of technology infrastructure with HP P9000 Smart Tiers software, which can provide automated, non-disruptive movement of data between classes of storage capacity - including solid-state drives - to balance performance and cost with business requirements.
    * Improved user interface with enhancements to HP Remote Web Console, which can simplify deployment of a storage infrastructure and reduce management time by 40 to 60 percent.(1)

"Many enterprise clients are struggling with how to improve availability levels, automate disaster recovery, and eliminate planned downtime," said Donna Scott, vice president, Distinguished Analyst, Gartner. "Since failures do occur, the key is limiting the extent of the outage in order to provide consistently high service levels to applications enabling critical business processes."Software enhancements to HP-UX 11i v3 and the HP Serviceguard Solutions portfolio for Integrity simplify mission-critical computing and improve system resiliency for the most demanding application workloads, enabling clients to:
    * Reduce manual configuration efforts by up to approximately 93 percent with the new HP Serviceguard Extension for Oracle e-Business Suite. This software is intended to provide automated configuration for more than 200 tightly integrated applications, including financial services, customer relationship management applications and interrelated components such as storage and networking.
    * Speed migration from IBM AIX to HP Integrity with the new HP-UX Porting Kit for AIX, which is intended to automate up to 95 percent of the steps required to complete the porting effort. The kit can also identify potential coding inconsistencies, accurately estimates effort and recommends solutions.
    * Consolidate legacy applications running on HP 9000 to HP Integrity systems in days, as opposed to months, using HP-UX 9000 Container virtualization technology. This solution can also enable clients to rapidly benefit from the performance improvements inherent to the latest HP Integrity systems.

HP Financial Services, the company's leasing and lifecycle asset management services division, can help clients gain a better return on their technology investments through the HP Financial Solution Analysis. This diagnostic tool can enable enterprise clients to analyze both direct and indirect costs associated with IT solutions. HP Financial Services offers a wide range of flexible financing options, including sale-leaseback services, designed to make it easy for clients to upgrade to HP solutions from competitors' equipment. Additional information about HP's new offerings is available at www.hp.com/enterprise/news.