HP unveils support for flexible IT

HP has unveiled a line-up of datacentre products and services designed to make IT flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstances.

The vendor said that these capabilities are needed because of uncertainty about how the economy will shape up over the next few years.

Among the announcements is an updated version of HP's Neoview data warehousing platform, and a new Converged Infrastructure architecture designed to deliver greater flexibility in the way storage and networks are configured, plus service offerings built on HP's acquisition of EDS last year.

Much of the technology is not new, according to analysts, but the strategy brings together products and services that can deliver lower cost datacentres that are easier to scale up when required.

"We are trying to help customers build an IT infrastructure to cope with the odd world that we find ourselves in at the moment," said Iain Stephen, vice president of enterprise servers and storage for HP in EMEA.

It is an "odd world" because uncertainty remains as to whether the economy will bounce back, whether business will pick up again but at a slower pace than before, or whether the industry will ever fully recover from the current recession, he explained.

Nevertheless, many businesses are already looking to implement something now that could give them a competitive advantage in the future, Stephen added.

"This means that flexibility is one of the most critical aspects of IT as far as chief information officers are concerned," he said.

A key part of the new announcements is the overhauled HP Neoview Advantage, according to Stephen, which is designed to help firms get a handle on their performance by adding real-time analytics to its existing data warehousing platform.

The updated solution has been given a 40 per cent performance improvement and now runs on HP's NonStop C-Class Integrity blade servers, making it "a very significant launch", he said.

Available from January 2010, Neoview Advantage also reduces cost of ownership with pre-built, pre-tested configurations.

HP also unveiled what it calls its Converged Infrastructure architecture, which is aimed at delivering IT capable of adjusting dynamically to business needs and is effectively an update of the Adaptive Infrastructure strategy that HP has followed for many years.

"All customers are struggling with how to reduce maintenance of existing systems to free up budget to innovate and do new stuff," said Stephen.

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