HP Prescribes Cure For Information Management Malaise

Setting the stage for the next evolution of the Instant-On Enterprise, which it started talking about late last year, HP is updating its information management (IM) portfolio, in part based on a customer survey indicating that 70 percent of organizations lack a holistic approach to managing business-critical information and instead are focused on managing infrastructure.

According to the world's largest IT vendor, "Instant-On Enterprises embed intelligence into everything they do for a transparent, real-time view of information across the organization to service customers, employees, partners and citizens with what they need instantly."  A new survey found that content explosion is adding greater complexity and causing significant storage issues and costs.

Only 20 percent of executives said that they were confident that IT could deliver the right information when needed. Combine that with the fact that more than half of the respondents said they are under pressure to cut costs on information-related processes and systems, and HP's integrated policy-driven processes and methodologies, as well as a broad portfolio of solutions, help break down these information silos.

New additions to the IM portfolio include half-day HP Transformation Workshops; increased HP Integrated Archive Platform (IAP) scalability (the solution can now manage up to 1 petabyte of data, 300,000 users and 20 million email messages per day); HP Virtual IAP's support for VMware vSphere; enhancement of HP TRIM Enterprise Records Management with multijurisdiction retention; integration of HP Database Archiving with HP TRIM; snapshot support in HP Data Protector software for 3PAR and non-HP arrays (at up to 70 percent less total cost of ownership), as well as for down-to-the-second snapshot recovery to HP StorageWorks P4000; HP Data Protector Reporter's improved insight into backup operations with multisite global analysis and reporting; and HP Storage Essentials software's ability to  decrease costs for managing physical and virtual enterprise information infrastructure, while the HP Storage Essentials Backup Manager plug-in for HP Data Protector helps organizations monitor the entire backup process.

With all of the product announcements, it is very easy to overlook the services component, which is designed to help customers optimally solve IM challenges, says Brian Babineau, VP, research and analyst services, Enterprise Strategy Group. "There are so many information management issues, from records management to data protection, that it can be daunting for a company to find a starting point. And, when they do find a starting point, they often solve that problem without considering any other issues. The HP IM Services Portfolio is designed to help organizations get started while ensuring that an actual broader strategy is in place."From the product perspective, Barbineau says, the extended TRIM support for Microsoft SharePoint is extremely timely, as this application continues to gain traction as a valuable collaboration and knowledge management tool. "Being able to manage SharePoint as records from a central location will help companies optimize the overall environment and meet compliance requirements."

The discrete information management challenges--including records management, e-discovery, compliance and IT asset optimization--are creating increased problems, and there is no shortage of solutions to solve these independently, says Barbineau.

"The competitive bar continues to move every time a solution provider has an announcement of this variety or at the individual product level. However, the industry benefits when a company with HP's stature begins educating the marketplace that information management issues have to be addressed by multiple stakeholders and several technologies working together."

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