HP aims to simplify and consolidate technology environments

It's all about enabling users to streamline their delivery of mission-critical application services, through a converged infrastructure. David Roberson, senior vice president and general manager of StorageWorks, HP, explains that CIOs need to ensure high availability of their most critical applications, while also 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 together improve application service delivery, he says, by providing an open, integrated architecture for the most demanding workloads. "The HP Converged Infrastructure breaks down costly and inefficient technology silos to reduce complexity and improve resiliency," states Roberson. In very brief detail, the P9500 builds on five generations of HP StorageWorks XP disk array technology. Now with a new user-centric design and standards-based architecture, it increases the quantity of data managed per administrator and fully doubles power efficiency, while also cutting data centre floor space requirements in half. Additionally, application-level quality of service controls enable clients to use and share storage resources, while enabling the delivery of mission-critical service-level agreements. As for the software, enhancements to HP-UX 11i v3 and the HP Serviceguard Solutions portfolio for Integrity also contribute to simplifying mission-critical computing, and HPS says they improve system resiliency even for the most demanding application workloads. The result is that users can reduce manual configuration efforts by up to 93%, for example, with HP Serviceguard Extension for Oracle e-Business Suite, which is intended to provide automated configuration for more than 200 tightly integrated applications.