HP is bidding to offer enterprises converged data center management based on virtualized resource pools, including networks and storage as well as servers, and managing them as an 'elastic' data center that can expand and contract with the economy.

HP's customer research during the current recession found that 80 percent of IT professionals out of 550 interviewed lacked confidence in their data centers' ability to scale up and scale down again, in response to economic fluctuations. At the same time, 90 percent believed the economy will continue to undergo unpredictable and volatile expansions and contractions.

“We believe IT can help the company gain in any economic conditions, if its technology is appropriately managed,” said Deb Nelson, senior VP for marketing, HP Enterprise Business. “Virtual resource pools are just as important for the network and storage as they are for servers,” she added in an interview.

HP is bringing some of its well-established expertise in network and systems management, business process management, and services management to bear on an old problem—reorganization of the data center. Part of HP's initiative is to push new professional services, what it calls Converged Infrastructure Consulting Services, that it said can help a data center staff make a transition.

At the same time HP believes it's got new tools with which its customers can attack the problem. HP's Converged Infrastructure architecture provides for managing virtual resource pools of storage through its StorageWorks storage management system. Nelson said HP's StorageWorks Division has been augmented through the July purchase of Ibrix, the maker of Fusion software. It can find underutilized storage, add it to a virtual pool and invoke it for a particular application workload.

Use of a virtual storage pool can reduce the cost per GB of storage from USD 3 to USD 4 to USD 1.80, Nelson said. In a similar manner, virtual pools of network and server resources, managed centrally to scale up or scale back for certain applications, as demand dictates, can offer similar savings, she said. The StorageWorks X9000 Network Storage System set of products can take now advantage of Ibrix capabilities to build a virtual storage pool of up to 16 petabytes, according to the announcement.

The StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform in its 3.0 version also offers a new Command View management interface, which creates virtual storage pools from capacity found in multiple StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Arrays. This management interface can improve capacity utilization by 300 percent, Nelson claimed. Storage arrays are sometimes used at 30 percent of capacity or less, due to a tendency by storage managers to overprovision applications.

Paul Miller, VP of marketing for HP Enterprise Storage, Servers and Networking, said the Converged Infrastructure architecture is "a way to build the data center of the future and deploy a cloud-like infrastructure operating system." The comment is an echo of VMware's announced intent to provide a data center operating system by coordinating management of virtualized resources through the virtual machine management layer.

HP will offer Infrastructure Operating Environment as a component of its infrastructure. IOE is a shared-services engine for automated provisioning of virtual and physical servers, equipped with network and storage connections. It focuses operations control in one command center. The core of IOE is HP's Insight Software, a set of products which can provision, deploy, and monitor BladeSystem Matrix, HP's blade unit that pre-integrates networking and storage into a blade cluster. BladeSystem is HP's unified computing system which launched last May.

Insight Dynamics has been given new features for automated provisioning of servers, automated recovery of failed servers, and automated recovery of virtual machines on HP ProLiant servers. HP works with the major virtualization vendors, including VMware's vCenter virtual machine management software and Microsoft's SystemCenter's ability to manage Hyper-V virtual machines.

Miller, in an interview, said the infrastructure architecture includes HP FlexFabric, which consolidates multiple protocols into a single network fabric, allowing both Ethernet network data and storage data to occupy the same network. FlexFabric is a merging of technologies from the HP ProCurve family of switching devices; HP Virtual Connect, which virtualizes server I/O; and technology partner contributions.

The fabric's ability to deal with more than one protocol simplifies storage network and Ethernet network operations. "There are fewer network ports, fewer cables, fewer switches" to administer, Miller said, making it easier to scale up or scale back network capabilities.

This part of the HP announcement is an echo of Cisco Systems' Unified Computing System announcements made in March, where networking and storage I/O are virtualized across one Cisco network fabric.

Miller said the HP FlexFabric brings more value to the data center than just converged networking. By reducing the amount of cables and equipment needed to implement a network fabric, IT managers can reduce their overall cost structure, reassign network resources as needed, and more quickly provision new servers.

The Converged Infrastructure architecture is also designed to improve data center power management, moving virtual machines off of underutilized servers, and shutting down other unneeded equipment.