HP's Project HAVEn rationalizes HP's portfolio while giving businesses a path to total data analysis

HP's new data analytics platform, announced today in Las Vegas, is designed to help organizations overcome the roadblocks to big data success and reap the rewards of data analysis.

Unveiled at HP Discover 2013, Project HAVEn leverages HP’s analytics software, hardware, and services to create big-data ready analytics applications and solutions.

HAVEn tackles some very big issues, both for the IT market and for HP. For the market, data and information remain fragmented, uncoordinated and hard to manage. At the same time, enterprises want to be able to use all the data they can access to better understand their businesses, users, and markets.

So HAVEn pulls together the growing army of HP analytics technologies and capabilities -- from Autonomy to Vertica to ArcSight and more -- allowing all kinds of data and information to be exploited in unison, with the dependencies and relationships mappable and hidden insights attainable across sources. And that insight can come from any type of information or content (Autonomy), with great speed and scale (Vertica) and associate with machine and IT systems data (ArcSight).

For HP, HAVEn shows the analytics whole is greater than the sum of the product parts, and presents a rationalization and uber value from its business intelligence, data and big data acquisitions and developments of the past five years. It also shows an agnostic approach to Hadoop, and an inclusive architecture alignment across analytics products and technologies, which is welcome.

According to a study commissioned by HP nearly 60 percent of companies surveyed will spend at least 10 percent of their innovation budget on big data this year. The study also found, however, that more than one in three organizations have failed with a big data initiative. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts. My travel to HP Discover 2013 was paid for by HP.]

HAVEn combines technologies from HP Autonomy, HP Vertica, HP ArcSight, and HP Operations Management, as well as key industry initiatives such as Hadoop, enabling clients and partners to:

• Avoid vendor lock-in with an open architecture that supports a broad range of analytics tools.
  
• Protect investments with support for multiple virtualization technologies.
  
• Speed time to value with highly optimized hardware solutions.
  
• Gain value from 100 percent of information, including structured, semistructured and unstructured data, via HP’s portfolio of more than 700 connectors into HAVEn.

Chris Selland, Vice President of Marketing at HP Vertica, explained the initiative: "The tip of the spear are our analytic engines, our analytic platforms, the Vertica Analytics Platform, Autonomy IDOL, ArcSight Logger. HAVEn is about taking this entire HP portfolio and then combining those with the power of Hadoop."

The first integrated big data analytics solution built on HAVEn is HP Operations Analytics, which delivers insight into all aspects of IT operations. The solution allows organizations to consume, manage, and analyze massive streams of IT operational data from a variety of HP products, including HP ArcSight Logger and the HP Business Service Management portfolio, as well as third-party sources.

Muller

HP Enterprise Services has introduced HP Actionable Analytics Services. These solutions will enable clients to implement analytics and extract insight hidden within big data, as well as streamline key organizational processes, such as customer offers, procurement, supply chain and inventory operations.

Paul Muller, Chief Evangelist at HP Software, explained the value of analytics: "It’s not the size of the data that matters, but it’s what you do with it. It’s about finding the connections between different data sets to help you improve competitiveness, help you improve efficiency if you are in the public sector, help you to detect fraud pattern. It's about what you do with the data in that connected intelligence that matters."

Big-data consulting

HP Technology Services has also expanded its Big Data Consulting Practice to ensure optimal IT infrastructure performance as well as support for increasing big data demands. New offerings include IT Strategy and Architecture, System Infrastructure, and Protection services that enable clients to align their IT infrastructure to organizational goals, while achieving compliance with industry standards and government regulations.

"The traditional systems or platforms that IT is used to providing are now becoming legacy. In other words, they're not providing the type of service level to meet the workload demands of the organization. So IT is faced with the challenge of how to transform that BI environment to more of a data refinement model or a big data ecosystem," said Tom Norton, Vice President for Big Data Technology Services at HP.

"The ability to respond quickly to this platform transformation is what we want to help our customers do from our technology services' perspective. How can we speed the maturity or speed the transformation of those traditional BI systems which are more sequential and more structured to be able to deal with the demands of the business to have relevant and refined information available to them at the time they need it, whether it’d be 1.5 seconds or 15 hours," said Norton.

HP also announced two additional products to help that effort:

• The HP Vertica Community Edition—free, downloadable software that delivers the same functionality of the HP Vertica Analytics Platform Enterprise Edition with no commitments or time limits, allowing clients to analyze up to one terabyte of data before investing in an enterprise-wide solution.
  
  
• The HP Autonomy Legacy Data Cleanup—information governance solution that helps clients analyze legacy data, lower costs, and reduce risks while driving value from big data. With this solution, organizations can access, understand and classify, as well as defensibly dispose of outdated and unnecessary legacy information, while retaining data deemed valuable for production applications.

Selland summed up the initiative this way, "You have to talk about customer analytics. You have to talk about preventing fraud. You have to talk about being able to operationally be more effective, more profitable, and all of those things that drive the business. It really becomes more-and-more a solutions discussion.

Selland

"HAVEn is the HP platform that provides our customers, our partners, and of course, our consultants, when our customers choose to have us do it for them, the ability to deliver these solutions. They're big-data solutions, analytic-enabled solutions. They're the solutions that companies, organizations, and global enterprises need to take their businesses forward and to make their customers more satisfied to become more profitable. That's what HAVEn is all about, the fundamental story behind the HAVEn initiative."

In other infrastructure news today at Discover, HP expanded the company's Converged Storage portfolio with a solid-state optimized all-flash HP 3PAR StoreServ system. It has also announced a StoreOnce Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) that promises to cut the cost of small site backup by 65 percent.

They're the solutions that companies, organizations, and global enterprises need to take their businesses forward.

The HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450 Storage system delivers more than 550,000 input/output operations per second with less than 0.7 millisecond response time. Flash-specific caching algorithms dynamically adjust read/write granularity to reduce latency and speed transactions. In addition, HP 3PAR Priority Optimization software assures performance for specific workloads to improve overall productivity.

HP StoreOnce VSA deploys as a virtual machine on existing industry-standard servers, eliminating the need for customers to purchase dedicated hardware. It enables backup as a service offering for hosting providers and lowers costs for enterprise remote office protection. In addition, HP StoreOnce VSA reduces physical hardware requirements by up to 50 percent and energy costs by up to 70 percent.

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