 Today, IT infrastructures operate within increasingly tight tolerances. Cost controls require fine-tuning the process of acquiring, deploying and optimizing new assets. IT must be aligned with the goals of the business, and above all, the services it delivers have to be dependable and available. Unplanned downtime can cost millions of dollars an hour.
Remote management is a common pain point for customers with multiple sites. Enterprises also want to simplify and speed up the process of deploying new software
New demands have emerged recently. “Companies are starting to feel that power is a limited resource,” says Brad Kirby, ProLiant Management Portfolio Marketing Manager for HP. Managers have to know how much power is available, and how many servers they can load onto a circuit or place in a rack. They frequently over provision to be on the safe side.
Another new concern is virtualization sprawl. It’s so easy to create virtual machines that the management piece can be overlooked as they multiply. “A virtual server needs to be managed just like a physical server,” Kirby says. “You need a consolidated toolset that allows you to associate virtual infrastructure with physical infrastructure and carry out management functions such as deployment, health and performance monitoring and patching, to be able to react or recover quickly from potential service disruptions.”
Tools for the job
A consolidated management toolset is the idea behind HP Insight Control Environment (ICE)/Insight Control Environment for BladeSystem. Insight Control is a suite of critical diagnostic and integrated management tools that automate processes to deploy, maintain and manage HP ProLiant and BladeSystem servers.
Capabilities include power measurement, capping and regulation, server asset management, warranty and service contract reporting, server health and performance monitoring, and rapid image or script-based server deployment. Virtual and physical servers can be managed together, and server vulnerabilities can be detected and software patches deployed.
“Gaining Business Value and ROI with HP Insight Control,” an IDC survey conducted in February 2008, found that users experienced a 402 percent ROI from single elements of Insight Control, and up to 563 percent on the full suite, with the payback period varying from 6.1 to 9.6 months. IDC also identified faster response to incidents, decreased downtime, an increase in the amount of infrastructure that can be managed by a single IT staff member, and an increase in the proportion of time available to improve systems.*
Real solutions for the real world
These metrics resonate with customers. Willbros Group, Inc., a leading international contractor serving the oil, gas, power and refining and petrochemical industries, implemented Systems Insight Manager (SIM), part of ICE, four years ago. “We have servers in nine locations, but only three dedicated server engineers,” says Ian Morrison, Willbros Director of IT Operations. “It would have been impossible to keep an eye on everything without SIM.”
At Cnetics, an HP reseller, the hardware management capabilities of Insight Control are a critical part of server virtualization. ICE proved its worth in a recent virtualization project for a Georgia government agency, according to Cnetics Solution Architect Dan Gunyon.
“Completing the new virtual server architecture is a complete set of management tools such as HP Insight Control infrastructure management software, which has allowed the agency to achieve an 80 percent reduction in server admin downtime, a reduction from five hours per server each month to only one hour,” Gunyon says.
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