In the second keynote for day three at Interop Mumbai 2010, Steven Dietch, Vice President, Cloud Infrastructure, HP talked about the benefits of converged infrastructure and private clouds. Dietch highlighted that over 70 percent of IT budgets are spend on just keeping the lights on, leaving less than 30 percent for innovation. "With converged infrastructure, you can converge your IT sprawl into a highly integrated, virtualized and orchestrated setup, which includes server, storage, networking and surrounding software," Dietch opined.

Dietch said that virtualization needs to be not only in servers but also in storage and networking, converting the entire infrastructure into a virtual pool of resources. However, it is important that the converged infrastructure needs to be resilient, secure, and open. The Data center of the future would have a common modular infrastructure, a sea of sensors, networking, common management, business technology optimization software and value added services.

"What's driving the adoption of private cloud is the need for speed, flexibility, and economics but IT challenges such as IT sprawl, control and integration still persist. Therefore, some of the musts for a private cloud include a self service portal, single governance and security model, real time charge back mechanism with usage reports, instant scalability with mission critical availability and it also needs to be optimized for business applications," Dietch said.

Talking about the solutions to address these challenges, Dietch talked about HP’s CloudStart Solution. "With CloudStart, within 30 days, IT can request a service from the portal, immediate service delivery, common security and management, scale or cancel the services, and finally offer consumption and chargeback reports."