Converged Infrastructure is HP’s blueprint for the future data center. At the annual HP Technology Forum 2010 in Las Vegas held between June 21 to 23, the company announced new products and services to support this blueprint. HP launched products like Virtual Connect and BladeSystem Matrix that integrate servers, storage, networking and management.

Brian Pereira asked Dave Donatelli, Executive VP & GM, Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking unit, HP how well the new products interoperate with those of competitors, and how they pay for themselves.

Are you considering interoperability with Cisco and other players, for the benefit of customers?
We are already interoperable with Cisco today. We’ve always believed in interoperability and open standards, and the networking side is no different. We want to interoperate with all the networking players out there even though we compete and sell products.

At USD 8,000 a piece Virtual Connect isn’t exactly cheap. So how do CIOs justify that cost?
If you look at anything we offer in networking it is significantly less expensive than alternatives today. If you look at our primary networking gear versus the market leader today, (ours is) 30 to 40 percent less in purchase price. So we offer people compelling value and savings.

It has been 10 years since you refreshed the Superdome architecture. Why has it taken so long and what has driven this?
Customers want architectures to have a significant lifespan. So there’s a trade-off between changing them too fast or letting them exist for too long. The big thing that we saw coming was the convergence. And that’s why you saw us go to the bladed infrastructure, which is unique—it is the only one out there for that class of product.

There is a lot of work to do there. These products used to be developed off 100 percent custom hardware. By taking it more towards some industry-standard components leveraging what we are doing with blades, and getting all the software to get you all the same feature functions that you are used to—it takes a lot of technical work to make that happen.

Value-added services are part of the converged infrastructure blueprint. Could you explain the kind of services you’ll be offering customers?
We offer customers as much or as little as they like. We can go in and help customers architect a transition to convergence. We can help them implement that in their data center. We can help them run their data center. We can even run a converged infrastructure through our services group at one of our locations or we can work with partners who can help customers set up a converged infrastructure at their location.

How does BladeSystem Matrix make it easier to deploy private clouds in the data center?
BladeSystem Matrix can manage the servers, networking, and storage—as well as the applications. With the cloud, you want to have a shared multi-tenant, multi-application infrastructure and the BladeSystem Matrix allows people to do that today. That’s a technology people can use today to deploy those private clouds. One of the challenges people have is over-provisioning. BladeSystem Matrix can ensure that you have those resources available when you need it.