HP unleashes barrage of offerings to add more 'oomph' to Converged Infrastructure benefits

Building on the momentum of its Converged Infrastructure strategy, HP this week announced new server, storage, network and power management technologies to enable clients to shift millions of dollars in operational costs to activities that drive business innovation.

HP’s Converged Infrastructure provides a blueprint for clients that want to eliminate sprawl, complexity and excess maintenance costs. The introductions at HP Tech Forum in Las Vegas include advancements in HP BladeSystem, including several new servers, as well as innovations in HP Virtual Connect and HP BladeSystem Matrix.

Also announced were power management technologies to automate energy awareness and control of IT systems across the data center, as well as storage software that provides new levels of simplicity and automation through a single, unified architecture for data deduplication. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The Tech Forum announcements come on the heels of the previous week's HP Software Universe news.

Among the new offerings are:

• Three new HP ProLiant scale-up servers, which offer several industry firsts with memory footprints of up to 2 terabytes (TB) and “self-healing” memory capabilities that maximize application uptime with a 200 percent boost in availability. Optimized for data-intensive workloads, the servers reduce data center footprint, complexity, and costs with a consolidation ratio up to 91-to-1.
  
  
• Seven new HP ProLiant G7 server blades with 1 TB of memory and integrated 10Gb Virtual Connect FlexFabric technology for I/O scalability. These systems can support up to four times more virtual machines, while requiring 66 percent less hardware.
  
  
• The new HP Virtual Connect FlexFabric module, a single device that connects servers to any Fibre Channel, Ethernet and iSCSI network. This eliminates the need for multiple interconnects.
  
  
• HP BladeSystem Matrix software, which offers one-touch, self-service provisioning of applications. The “all inclusive” converged infrastructure offering enables private clouds by allowing clients to deploy complex IT environments in minutes. As a result, HP claims that clients can reduce their total cost of ownership up to 56 percent compared to traditional IT infrastructures.
  
  
• HP Intelligent Power Discovery, which creates an automated, energy-aware network between HP ProLiant servers, third-party facility management tools, and data center power grids. The software provides greater transparency and insight into power usage by creating a real-time, graphical map of energy usage across servers and facilities. By accurately provisioning energy, HP estimates that clients can extend the lives of their data centers and save up to $5 million per every 1,000 servers in one year.
  
  
• HP StoreOnce, a solution to automate data deduplication across the enterprise with a single unified architecture. It is built on patented innovation and features designed by HP Labs, the company’s research arm and reduces costs by eliminating multiple stored versions of the same data.

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I collaborate, therefore I think, therefore I am ... an enterprise

They say we have big brains because we have all needed to work better together over the past 150,000 years. The more people work together, the more tools they need to make collaboration a productive art, rather than a befuddled mess.

Rather than wait for human evolution to keep up the pace, Salesforce.com yesterday delivered its Chatter cloud-based collaboration service, based on social networking methods more common on Facebook or Twitter.

Directed first at enterprise help desk and customer service processes, Chatter has the strong potential to become a company-wide collaboration accelerant. And if that happens, more data and insights into what people do to solve problems can be identified, refined, repeated, automated, and extended. The cloud model makes this easy to afford, to get to and to expand.

Chatter, and its ilk quickly sprouting up elsewhere, can foster better, targeted and self-directing collaboration; can spur and capture the data about processes in progress, and can become a service feature within nearly any business application, process or ecosystem.

Email can not do this. Instant messaging, no. Portals, not quite. Chatter shows that email's role is overextended, counter-productive, and in need of a replacement.

But what caught me by surprise in watching Salesforce.com's Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff introduce Chatter yesterday in San Jose, CA, was not that consumer-focused social media motifs have a place in the productivity enterprise portfolio. What screams to me of "killer app" is that the data from social interaction are freer in the enterprise than they are on the open Web.

The data and analytics derived from Chatter are not defined by privacy boundaries, or the attempt to define and maintain them. Any user company controls the data, and so the data is free to be cultivated, consumed, analyzed, reused, extended, captured, codified, integrated, innovated from.

The data from social media and network activities in the enterprise therefore is far more free and open to the enterprise needs than Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo or Google are free to use or share the data they have about what their (your) users do.

Virtual scrum for the rest of us

Chatter helps to sort out what comes next when processes and people collide. Like with our communicative ancestors as they faced challenges in the dynamic wild, self-selecting groupings, pairings and open-ended dialogue about how to react to a situation can arise and amend via Chatter. This is a tool that entices and abets collaboration, rather than confines or stifles it. Too often machine-made silos confine today's online interactions into point-to-point email threads that swiftly run aground.

The sweet spots to try out these cloud- and participant-accelerated cooperative scrums are help desk, service desk and IT. But it can and will go much further. Already more than 6,000 of Salesforce.com's customers have adopted the new social collaboration application, out of 77,300 potential customers for the San Francisco-based SaaS business applications and services development platform provider.

HP has seen the powerful confluence of IT functions and social networking tools and UIs, as evidenced by its limited-beta 48Upper SaaS collaboration tool. I received a demo of 48Upper last week, and all the things that make Chatter powerful work there as well. I hope HP targets 48Upper beyond the IT department. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

For while such uses as in software development and IT support are a no-brainers for Chatter and 48Upper, as they align well with agile and scrum methods, this is but the beginning. In a fast-paced business world, these app dev principles now have huge relevancy across many more business functions and processes. And Chatter can be the catalyst for doing so. It fits in well with Japanese kaizen and Deming-derived thinking too.

What's more, Metcalfe's Law has a supporting role, in that the more people that use Chatter, the more valuable it is; and there's a qualitative branch to the support -- the better the dialogue and sharing, the higher quality the thinking in the Chatter ongoing scrum, the more everyone benefits. This is the 100,000-year-old self-reinforcing frontal lobes cognition that makes us our human best ... together.

HP's Anton Knolmar recaps highlights of Software Universe conference, looks to future

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

Welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast, an interview with Anton Knolmar, Vice President of Marketing for HP Software & Solutions, conducted by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

The one-on-one discussion comes to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Washington D.C. We're here the week of June 14, 2010, to explore some major enterprise software and solutions trends and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

Here are some excerpts:

Knolmar: I'm really excited about having so many customers here. We've been sold-out, which is a good sign. Customers are also really interested in sharing their solutions and sharing their information with us. At the end of the day, where we are totally committed is providing value to those customers.

We kicked it off the first day on the main stage, with our new Executive Vice President, Bill Veghte, talking about IT as an inflection point and how, with our solution portfolio, can help our customers provide even greater value for their organizations. That was a good lead-in.

I was even more excited, when we had customers on stage. Delta Air Lines’ Theresa Wise did a fantastic job explaining the challenges they were facing with integrating and acquiring Northwest Airlines, and getting those two companies together using our portfolio.

We got compliments and feedback about Dara Torres and what she was showing on stage here, on how you can compete, independent of what age, if you try to give your best in your personal, private, and business life. This was a good learning experience for all of our customers.

Then, we moved to the next event, our blockbuster product announcement, BSM 9.0, rolling this one out across the world, with different solutions in a single pane of glass, with the automation, and simplification.

It’s not "one solution fits all," and that’s what we are trying to do with our customers as well -- a really customized solution approach.

The feedback we received from our customers is that this is exactly what they've been looking for. And, they are even looking forward to more simplification. The simpler we can make it for them in their complex life, in their complex environment, whatever comes in from cloud, from virtualization, from new technologies, the better they all feel and the better we can serve them.

It wasn't just one customer who had one story to tell. We had to set aside an executive track, where we had a different levels of customers, talking about the problems and how they're facing problems. It’s not "one solution fits all," and that’s what we are trying to do with our customers as well -- a really customized solution approach.

What they're telling us in terms of this broad range of delivery is that it's a huge opportunity for everyone in the cloud. Also, everyone is saying, "We hate the word cloud," but that’s the word everyone uses. The delivery models that are out there at the moment, the new technology, the mobility factor, the growth of the smartphones, the mobile devices, is a big thing, and will be more in the future.

Being future-ready

Our customers are still challenged with their current environment, with their legacy environment. They say, "We still have mainframes to manage and all this new technology is coming in here." What they're trying to do is, and what we are trying to equip them with the current portfolio that we have, is to manage, monitor, and make the best out of the current investments, but also with our solutions portfolio, to be future ready.

So whatever new technology comes out, they're equipped and they can adopt this immediately in their current environment. They should be really happy with what we announced this week to be future ready for their future investments, as well whatever comes up.

his was an exciting moment for us, getting our blockbuster out. A new blockbuster is coming, so stay tuned for that. That happens in September. We will also take Software Universe on the road. The next event is happening in Israel in a few weeks. We have a big crowd coming in, 1,500 customers, which is a huge gathering for Israelis.

The other piece is that we have HP TechForum, which is our sister conference, where we get the enterprise business, going on in Las Vegas this week. We're definitely excited. Stay tuned here. We're in Europe, in Barcelona, at the end of November, with our next Software Universe event.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

HP's Anand Eswaran on pragmatic new approaches to IT solutions and simplicity for 'everything as a service' era

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

Welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast, an interview with Anand Eswaran, Vice President of Professional Services for HP Software & Solutions, conducted by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

The one-on-one discussion comes to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Washington D.C. We're here the week of June 14, 2010, to explore some major enterprise software and solutions trends and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

Here are some excerpts:

Eswaran: When a customer is thinking about a solution, they make a buying decision. The next step for them is to deploy the products they buy as a result of that solution, which they committed to from a roadmap standpoint. Once they finish that, they have to operate and maintain the solution they put in place.

The classic problem in the industry is that, when the customer has a problem, after they have deployed the solution, they call the support organization. The support organization, if they determine the problem is actually with the project and the customizations, cannot support it. Then, the customer will be punted back to the consulting organization, whoever they used. In some ways, the industry plays a little bit of ping-pong with the customer, which is a really bad place to be.

What we're trying to do is get to the heart of it and say that we cannot introduce our organizational complexity to the customer. We want to make it simple. We want to make it transparent to them.

Everybody talks about business outcomes, but if there are multiple organizations responsible for the same business outcome for the customer, then, in my view, nobody is responsible for the business outcome for the customer. That’s the second thing at the heart of the problem we're trying to solve.

At Software Universe we announced the launch of a new portfolio element called Solution Management Services, and I'll refer to it as SMS through this conversation.

Very briefly, what it does is offer the ability for us to support the entire solution for the customer, which is different from the past, where software companies could only support the product. That’s the heart of what it means. But, it’s the first step in a very large industry transformation we are ushering in.

Services convergence

Where we're going with this is that we're looking at what we call the concept of services convergence, where we're trying to make sure that we support the full solution for the customer, remove internal organizational complexity, and truly commit to, and take accountability for, the business outcome for the customer.

Specifically what it means is that we've put up an 18-month roadmap to fuse the services and the support organizations into one entity. We basically take care of the customer across the full lifecycle of the solution, build the solution, deploy the solution, and maintain the solution, They they have one entity, one organization, one set of people to go to across the entire lifecycle. That’s what we're doing.

To put it back in the context of what I talked about at the new portfolio launch, SMS is the first step and a bridge to get to eventual services convergence. SMS is a new portfolio with which the consulting organization is offering the ability to support the solution, until we get to one entity as true services in front of the customer. That’s what SMS is. It’s a bridge to get to services convergence.

Our goal is to support the full solution, no matter what percentage of it is not HP Software products.

The cool part is that this is an industry-leading thing. You don’t see services convergence, that’s industry leading.

Just as SMS is the first step toward services convergence, services convergence is the critical step to offering "Everything as a Service" for the customer. If you don’t have the organizations aligned internally, if you don’t have the ability to truly support the full lifecycle for the customer, you can never get to a point of offering Everything as a Service for the customer.

If you look at services as an industry, it hasn't evolved for the last 40 or 50 years. It’s the only industry in technology which has remained fairly static. Outside of a little bit of inflection on labor arbitrage, offshoring, and the entire BPO industry, which emerged in the 1990s, it's not changed.

Moving the needle

Our goal is to move the needle to have the ability to offer Everything as a Service. Anything that is noncompetitive, anything that is not core to the business of an organization, should be a commodity and should be a service. Services convergence allows us to offer Everything as a Service to the customer. That’s where we are heading.

As we look at it, we see the biggest value in first treating it as a horizontal. Because this is going to be such an inflection point in how technology is consumed by the customers, we want to get the process, we want to get the outcomes, and we want to get what this means for the customer right the first time.

Once we get there, the obvious next step is to overlay that horizontal process of offering Everything as a Service.

Once we get there, the obvious next step is to overlay that horizontal process of offering Everything as a Service, with vertical and industry taxonomies.

When you talk about inflection points in the history of technology, the Internet probably was the biggest so far. We're probably at something that is going to be as big, in terms of how consumption happens for customers. Everything non-core, everything noncompetitive is a service, is a commodity.

There are many different mechanisms of consumption. Cloud is one of them. It’s going to take a little bit of maturity for customers to evolve to a private cloud, and then eventually consume anything non-core and noncompetitive as part of the public cloud.

We're getting geared, whether it’s infrastructure, data centers, software assets, automation software, or whether it is consulting expertise, to weave all of that together. We've geared up now to be able, as a best practice, to offer multi-source, hybrid delivery, depending on, one, the customer appetite, and two, where we want to lead the industry, not react to the industry.

A different approach

If you look at the last few years and at the roadmap which HP has built, whether it is software assets, like Mercury, Peregrine, Opsware, and all of it coming together, whether it is the consulting assets, like the acquisition of EDS, which is now called HP Enterprise Services (ES), there was a method to the madness.

We want to approach [the market] in a very different way. We want to tell the customer, "You have a 5 percent defect level across the entire stack, from databases and networks, all the way up to your application layer. And that’s causing you a spend of $200 million to offer true business outcomes to your customer, the business."

Instead of offering a project to help them mitigate the risk and cost, our offer is different. We are saying, "We'll take a 5 percent defect level and take it to 2.5 percent in 18 months. That will save you north of a $100 million of cost." Our pricing proposal at that point is a percentage of the money we save you. That’s truly getting to the gut of business outcomes for the customer.

It also does one really cool thing. It changes the pattern of approvals that anybody needs to get to go do a project, because we are talking about money and tangible outcomes, which we will bring about for you.

The last five years is the reason we're at the point that we are going to lead the industry in offering Everything as a Service.

That's not going to be possible without the assets we have consolidated from a software, hardware, or ES standpoint. All of this comes together and that makes it possible.

When you talk about inflection points in the history of technology, the Internet probably was the biggest so far. We're probably at something that is going to be as big, in terms of how consumption happens for customers. Everything non-core, everything noncompetitive is a service, is a commodity.

There are many different mechanisms of consumption. Cloud is one of them. It’s going to take a little bit of maturity for customers to evolve to a private cloud, and then eventually consume anything non-core and noncompetitive as part of the public cloud.

We're getting geared, whether it’s infrastructure, data centers, software assets, automation software, or whether it is consulting expertise, to weave all of that together. We've geared up now to be able, as a best practice, to offer multi-source, hybrid delivery, depending on, one, the customer appetite, and two, where we want to lead the industry, not react to the industry.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

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Fiberlink Communications rolls out cloud-based patch-management service

Keeping mobile devices patched and protected -- and making it safer for enterprise employees to work on the Web -- is giving IT admins plenty of headaches. Fiberlink Communications is offering an aspirin, of sorts, with a new cloud-based patch management service.

Dubbed MaaS360 Patched Management from the Cloud Service, the service works to mitigate the risks of the mobile, Internet-connected workforce by streamlining management and deployment of security patches to PCs, laptops, and mobile devices that connect to external wireless networks. The new service promises to protect against data breaches while battling the trend toward inflating help desk costs (along with slowed employee productivity).

“More than ever, patch management is a critical part of IT operations. Enterprises cannot just rely on Microsoft’s monthly patch updates for their entire patch maintenance strategy,” says John Nielsen, a product manager at Fiberlink. Nielsen says the service also covers common applications from vendors like Apple, Adobe and Sun.

The case for cloud-based patch deployment

IT administrators are already aware of how dangerous it is not to keep security software and patches up to date, but Fiberlink is nonetheless hammering home the message about the perils of inadequate patch management because it sees a disconnect between the knowledge of the danger and actual IT practices.

At issue may be enterprise IT policies that only focus on operating system patches and fail to take into account Java, QuickTime and other common apps in the enterprise today. But when malware infects those applications, it can send a ripple throughout the enterprise. Fiberlink is pointing to industry research to bolster its case for keeping software and patches current.

For example, the Ponemon Institute reports that the cost of a data breach increased to $6.75 million in 2009. And the Quant Patch Management Survey reveals that 50 percent of enterprises do not have a formal patch-management process, 54 percent do not measure compliance with patch-management policies and 68 percent do not track patch time-to-deployment.

MaaS360 in action

Fiberlink is aiming to make it so convenient to keep systems and software up to date with the MaaS360 Patch Management from the Cloud Service that the enterprise will take notice. The service not only tracks and pushes patches for operating systems, applications and vulnerabilities, it also uses analysis techniques to make sure the patches are applied properly and that all files are current. The service offers up reporting and analytics so IT admins can monitor what is going on.

“Prior to MaaS360 we had to use four different consoles to check the AV, firewall and patch compliance of our corporate and remote users,” says Bill Dawson, Technical Services Manager, Mizuno USA. “The MaaS360 portal brings all that data together so we can quickly assess our compliance level and zoom in on problem areas with the drill-down function. For the first time in my memory we don't have to jump through hoops to track our software.”

BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jleclaire and http://www.jenniferleclaire.com.

Aster Data delivers 30 analytic packages and MapReduce functions for mainstream data analytics

Aster Data, which provides data management and data processing platform for big data analytic applications, today announced the delivery of over 30 ready-to-use advanced analytic packages and more than 1,000 MapReduce-ready functions to enable rapid development of rich analytic applications on big data sets.

The solution is a massively parallel database with an integrated analytics engine that leverages the MapReduce framework for large-scale data processing and couples SQL with MapReduce.

The expanded suite of pre-packaged SQL-MapReduce and MapReduce-ready functions accelerates the ability to build rich analytic applications that process terabytes to petabytes of data. [Disclosure: Aster Data, San Carlos, Calif., is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

We have found that analytics that previously took weeks to months of SQL coding can now be built in days with richer analytic power than what is possible with SQL alone.

Traditional data management platforms and analytic solutions do not scale to big data volumes and restrict business insight to views that only represent a sample of data, which can lead to undiscovered patterns, restricted analysis and missed critical events. MapReduce is emerging as a parallel data processing standard, but often requires extensive learning time and specialized programming skills.

Coupling the SQL language with MapReduce eliminates the need to learn MapReduce programming or parallel programming concepts. Other benefits of this coupling include:

• Making MapReduce applications usable by anyone with a SQL skill-set.

• Enabling rich analytic applications to be built in days due to the simplicity of SQL-MapReduce and Aster Data’s suite of pre-built analytic functions.

• Delivering ultra-high performance on big data, achieved by embedding 100 percent of the analytics processing in-database, eliminating data movement.

• Automatically parallelizing both the data and application processing with SQL-MapReduce for extremely high performance on large data sets.

New functions

Aster Data also announced today a significant expansion in the library of MapReduce-ready functions available in Aster Data nCluster. The Aster Data nPath function is only one example of more than 1,000 functions now delivered through over 40 packages available with the Aster Data Analytic Foundation for Aster Data nCluster 4.5 and above.

These new functions cover a wide range of advanced analytic use cases from graph analysis to statistical analysis to predictive analytics, that bring extremely high value business functions out of the box that accelerate application development. Examples include:

• Text Analysis: Allows customers to "tokenize" count and position or count the occurrences of words as well as track the positions of words/multi-word phrases.

• Cluster Analysis: Includes segmentation techniques, like k-Means, which groups data into naturally occurring clusters.

• Utilities: Includes high value data transformation computations. For example developers can now simply unpack and pack nested data as well as anti-select, or allow the return of all columns except for those that are specified.

Aster also revealed new partners that are working closely with Aster Data’s data-analytics server, nCluster, to simplify development of highly-advanced and interactive analytic applications that process extremely large data volumes. Partners using SQL-MapReduce for rich analytics include Cobi Systems, Ermas Consulting, and Impetus Technologies.

Amiya Mansingh of Cobi Systems said, “There’s no question that Aster Data’s solution and SQL-MapReduce offers a powerful, yet easy-to-use framework to build rich, high performance applications on big data sets. We have found that analytics that previously took weeks to months of SQL coding can now be built in days with richer analytic power than what is possible with SQL alone. ”

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