HP Contends For IT Heavyweight Crown

While HP has led the IT market for some time on a revenue basis, its latest announcements continue the company's evolution from its commodity PC, server and printer roots to the enterprise roost that has been ruled by IBM since the dawn of the information age. HP is announcing a number of Converged Infrastructure solutions that bundle hardware, software and services, targeted at what the company calls the Instant-On Enterprise.

Having kicked sand in Cisco's face with its network announcements last month, HP is now focusing its sights on combating IT sprawl with turnkey solutions that "deliver new levels of speed, simplicity and efficiency that enable clients to capitalize and anticipate change."

Monday's introductions include: Converged Systems, a new portfolio of turnkey hardware, software, consulting and services; Converged Storage architecture and portfolio, which integrates HP Store360 scale-out software with HP BladeSystem and HP ProLiant hardware; Converged Data Center, a new class of HP Performance Optimized Data Centers (PODs), including the HP POD 240a or HP EcoPOD, which uses 95% less facilities energy; and HP Server Automation 9.1 software, which seamlessly provisions physical and virtual application instances across the entire life cycle.

It's all about driving extreme simplicity to the fastest time to value, says HP. With Converged Systems, solutions can be up and running in hours instead of months.

More than any other systems vendor, HP has tightened its product lines, messaging and marketing around a single theme--Converged Infrastructure--says analyst Mike Kahn, managing director, The Clipper Group. “HP has skillfully wrapped its convergence message into an easy-to-identify rallying flag, one that stands higher than all of the rest. Does this give them a competitive advantage? In many ways, yes, as it brings distinctive strategic differentiation into a world of infrastructure based on commodity components. If you crave infrastructure simplicity, HP's converged infrastructure is the place to start.”

In the old days, says Kahn, we used to say that you needed to look "beneath the covers," but that applies much less in this world of commoditized innards. “Today, you have to look 'beyond the covers' to the software that turns hardware into appliances and solutions and the services that accelerate adoption and use. HP has been investing heavily here to fill out its portfolio, and its new and improved offerings have achieved a sizable mass, certainly big enough to offer much to those across the small-business-to-large-enterprise spectrum.”Today's enterprise IT strategists now basically know what they need for their data centers to meet the coming hybrid and cloud requirements, says Dana Gardner, principal analyst, Interarbor Solutions. They will be using more virtualization; relying on standard hardware; managing their servers, storage and networks with increased harmony; supporting big data business intelligence; and dealing with more mobile devices.

“HP is coming out with data center assets and services that--pretty much better than ever for IT--provide many on-ramps to modernizing all core IT infrastructure. The new and augmented products can be used by many types of organizations--and at any stages of maturity--to set out to meet modern and complete IT requirements. And they can do so knowing the capital and operating costs can be measured, managed and contained. These total IT costs are also being driven down from advancements in utilization, management, modular data center growth and pervasive energy conservation.”

Most IT vendors are either hardware-heavy or software-centric, or lack depth in a major category like networking, says Gardner. There are only a very few vendors that can supply the end-to-end data center transformation portfolio for the major domains of servers, storage, network and operational management. “This is a market shift in which IBM and HP are extending their lead for total IT infrastructure support over other segmented vendors like Oracle, Dell and Microsoft.”

For analyst Rob Enderle, Enderle Group, from the standpoint of full integration of storage, networking and servers, HP's announcements are a unique differentiated set of solutions. “Aggressive on technology and very aggressive on price and energy savings.” He says Oracle is mostly a hardware solution for Oracle software and lacks the breath and aggressive focus on costs HP has. “IBM’s approach is more traditional and has far more choices in terms of technology and can match Oracle on software, but doesn’t have the level of integration HP has.” It is likely better in the mid-range and with Microsoft-centric solutions, but lacks the high end that HP can provide.

Enderle was most impressed with the POD 240a announcement. “The EcoPOD is pretty cool, kind of a container data center. The entire thing is optimized for power and you can upgrade the entire structure as a component and have much of the initial testing done at HP before delivery. Integrated networking, storage, servers, and you can increase capacity by adding additional containers. Dell is making these things as well, but HP’s adaptive cooling technology and highly integrated racks should allow for much greater capacity in the same-size container. You get more in the same physical space and an estimated 95% reduction in energy use [according to HP]. That’s pretty impressive. Should also be a sharp reduction in installation cost because you don’t have to build out a data center.”

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