HP has beefed up its portfolio of products and services for data centres in an effort to capitalise on an expected wave of infrastructure renewal and rationalisation at these core business facilities over the next two years.

At the company’s annual European customer showcase in Barcelona, it pulled together bundles of data centre services for tackling virtualisation, consolidation and design and planning that span core data centre elements: facilities, networks, storage, servers, applications, process management and governance. HP also used its Technology@Work conference to launch tools for unifying the management of both physical and virtual systems and unveiled a data centre-as-a-service offering based on SAP and Microsoft applications.

The introduction of HP Critical Facilities services follows the company’s recent acquisition of EYP Mission Critical Facilities. The services set cover data centre consulting, design and service assurance, aimed at keeping data centre costs in check by the efficient use of space, power and cooling, while also ensuring facilities are scalable to business requirements.

Two other services, Data Centre Consolidation and Data Centre Virtualisation formalise and group together a lot of work the company has already been undertaking with customers. But a further offering, HP adaptive infrastructure-as-a-service (AIaaS), takes the company into new territory. Through AIaaS, customers can run a bundle of applications (SAP and Microsoft Exchange are the initial implementations) on pre-built and pre-configured systems within HP-owned and managed data centres.

On the product side, the focus was on automation. HP Insight Dynamics – VSE enables systems managers to analyse and optimise both physical and virtual resources in the same way. Supporting multi-vendor hypervisor technologies, VSE is capable of reducing the cost of common data centre tasks by as much as 40%, the company claims. It plugs into HP Systems Insight Manager. “This is the coolest technology on earth,” said Lucio Furlani, VP of marketing for HP’s Technology Services Group in EMEA. “It merges together the physical and the virtual to create the concept of a logical server.”

The HP announcements come as analysts are predicting a surge in data centre renewal activity.

A recent survey cited by Ann Livermore, the head of HP’s Technology Services Group, found that more than a third of CEOs and CIOs believe that their existing data centres will be unable to meet company demands. In another survey conducted by HP, 86% of the IT decision-makers questioned voice the opinion that their data centre was only adequate “in the short-term”

Companies are living with aging infrastructure – old facilities with power and cooling problems that often can’t handle the required processing demands put on them by the business, says Livermore.

Further reading

HP refocuses R&D on cloud computing

The new data centre As the subject of energy use moves ever higher on the IT agenda, efficiency has become the watchword for data centre operations

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