Tuesday, March 6, 2012

HP announces first servers in the Gen8 family for improving management, ROI, and energy conservation in the data center

HP today announced general availability of the first batch of servers in its ProLiant Gen8 series, which the company unveiled last month.

The new generation of servers, part of a two-year, $300-million effort, benefit from ProActive Insight archtecture, including lifecycle automation, dynamic workload acceleration, automated energy optimization, and proactive service and support. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Manual operations and facilities management can cost companies more than $24 million over three years, while unplanned downtime is estimated to cost companies as much as $10 million an hour. As a result, data center managers must rely on more intelligent, self-sufficient technologies that eliminate the time-consuming, error-prone processes that consume valuable resources and can cause both failure and data loss.

ProLiant now includes the Intel Xeon E5-2600 processor family, which beta testing has indicated can provide a return on investment (ROI) in as little as five months, while tripling administrators' productivity.

HP developed the new generation of servers in collaboration with HP Labs, the company’s central research arm, to offer data center-wide, end-to-end energy management including HP 3D Sea of Sensors and HP Location Discovery Services. As a result, the new energy optimized technology included in the servers delivers nearly double data center capacity per watt.

To accelerate virtualized and data-intensive application performance, engineers balanced the system architecture while unifying storage, I/O and compute resources to create a converged system platform, designed for the needs of virtualized environments, cloud deployments and the most demanding data center and workloads available.

Lots of excitement

"We've seen lots of excitement among customers during the beta testing and not only in performance," said John Gromala, Director, Product Marketing, Industry Standard Servers and Software for HP. "We focused on their IT needs and we're helping them deal with runaway costs. That's the piece that people are more excited about than anything. If they can get those costs in line, then IT can make it."

The comprehensive portfolio of HP ProLiant Gen8 servers include:
  • ProLiant BL460c, the world’s leading server blade, is ideal for a data center’s transition to the cloud

    That's the piece that people are more excited about than anything. If they can get those costs in line, then IT can make it.


  • ProLiant DL360p, versatile, rack-optimized server that offers high performance, efficiency and reliability in a 1U space
  • ProLiant DL380p, supports the broadest spectrum of workloads and provides for future scalability as needs change
  • ProLiant ML350p, expandable tower server well suited for remote and branch offices
  • ProLiant SL230s, a multi-node server for maximum performance of high density scale-out and high performance computing (HPC) environments
  • ProLiant SL250s, ideal for heterogeneous and custom data centers focused on graphics processing unit (GPU) computing
  • ProLiant DL160, ultra-dense rack server designed for web serving and memory-intensive applications.
Tested in more than 100 data centers by real-world customers, the new platforms are expected to ship worldwide in late March. Starting prices will range from $1,723 to $2,878 and vary based on configurations.

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at 3:43 PM 0 comments

Open Group's OTTF 'snapshot' addresses risks from counterfeit and tainted products

The Open Group has announced the publication of the Open Trusted Technology Provider Standard (O-TTPS) Snapshot, a preview of what is intended to become the first standard developed by The Open Group Trusted Technology Forum (OTTF).

Geared toward global providers and acquirers of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) information and communication technology (ICT) products, the O-TTPS is designed to provide an open standard for organizational best practices to enhance the security of the global supply chain and help assure the integrity of COTS ICT products worldwide. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Standards such as O-TTPS will have a significant impact on how organizations procure COTS ICT products over the next few years.



The snapshot provides an early look at the standard so providers, suppliers and integrators can begin planning how to implement the standard in their organizations, and so customers, including government acquirers, can differentiate those providers who adopt the standard's practices.

Version 1.0 of the standard is expected to be published in late 2012. The Open Group is planning an accreditation program to help provide assurance that providers conform to the standard.

Increasing threats

"With the increasing threats posed by cyberattacks worldwide, technology buyers at large enterprises and government agencies across the globe need assurance the products they source come from trusted technology suppliers and providers who have met set criteria for securing their supply chains," said David Lounsbury, chief technology officer, The Open Group. "Standards such as O-TTPS will have a significant impact on how organizations procure COTS ICT products over the next few years and how business is done across the global supply chain."

The Trusted Technology Forum was formed in late 2010 under the auspices of The Open Group to help technology companies, customers, government and supplier organizations create and promote guidelines for manufacturing, sourcing and integrating trusted, secure technology products as they move through the global supply chain.

The two risks being addressed in the snapshot are tainted and counterfeit products. Each pose significant risk to organizations because altered or non-genuine products introduce the possibility of untracked malicious behavior or poor performance. Both product risks can damage customers and suppliers resulting in failed or inferior products, revenue and brand equity loss, and disclosure of intellectual property.

Additional resources are available on line:
  • For more information on the O-TTPS Snapshot or to download, visit The Open Group Bookstore click here.
  • For more information on The Open Group Trusted Technology Forum, click here.
  • To view a video featuring OTTF Co-Chair and Cisco's chief security strategist for the Global Value Chain Edna Conway discussing the work of the OTTF, click here.
  • To attend a Webinar on the O-TTPS Snapshot entitled "Developing Standards that Secure the Global Supply Chain, Enabling Suppliers Globally to Raise the Bar on Security and Integrity," on March 15, 2012 at register here.
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at 10:26 AM 0 comments
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