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Two worlds as one

“Most organizations are seeking relief in the areas of infrastructure cost, the time necessary to make routine changes, service quality and power consumption,” says Frances Guida, Manager, Virtualization, for HP. “For these reasons, HP offers Adaptive Infrastructure solutions that form an integrated, shared, flexible environment versus the isolated islands of IT systems that many companies struggle to manage.”

How does a company establish adaptive infrastructure?

“They need to think differently,” Guida claims. “And they need to be more proactive with things like capacity and power planning, change management and service availability. Like a high-end automobile, today’s infrastructure systems need to be regularly tuned if they are to run smoothly.”

Most IT organizations fix problems instead of preventing them. And, Guida says, they get trapped in endless problem resolution.

Fortunately, new software tools offer continuous monitoring, analysis and optimization capabilities. HP Insight Dynamics – VSE (Virtual Server Environment) is the first solution to let IT professionals control virtual and physical resources in the same way. It combines the best of HP’s infrastructure management tools—including Systems Insight Manager, Insight Control and Virtual Server Environment—in an integrated offering for HP ProLiant, BladeSystem and Integrity servers.

Insight Dynamics – VSE helps organizations gain adaptive infrastructure and lower infrastructure management costs by up to 40 percent. “It brings the flexibility of virtualization to physical servers and enables IT teams to control physical and virtual resources in the same way,” says Guida. “It also provides real-time capacity planning for servers and power.”

Hands-on management

“Because the software continuously monitors the environment, it can produce detailed simulations that show the full impact of changes, both large and small,” says Guida. “IT professionals no longer have to make educated guesses by manually poring over spreadsheets or using capacity averages.”

Consolidating servers, for example, raises several questions. How many physical servers will be needed? Where will workloads be placed? How will capacity, service levels and power consumption be affected? What will the changes cost? Insight Dynamics – VSE provides answers. With Smart Solver technology— developed by HP Labs—and the five-star rating system it powers, IT can examine a number of scenarios and see power, utilization and cost implications.

“Organizations spend less time trying to figure out the impact of changes and can be more proactive with capacity planning and power management,” Guida says. “Doing so improves the quality of service and reduces the time and cost of infrastructure operations.”

Guida notes that the software doesn’t replace virtualization solutions from HP partners, but brings the physical and virtual together to be managed collectively, complementing the tools and expertise offered by HP partners such as VMware.

“VMware and HP have a shared vision for an agile datacenter,” explains Brian Byun, Vice President of Global Partners and Solutions for VMware. “VMware’s market-leading virtualization solutions combined with HP’s strength in infrastructure management provide customers with dynamic mobility, high availability and improved resource management in their data centers. We look forward to the combination of VMware virtualization with HP Insight Dynamics – VSE to deliver an effective environment that spans both virtual and physical resources.”

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