INDUSTRY

HP has expanded its portfolio of virtualization services with a new offering that helps enterprise customers virtualize their entire IT infrastructures – from the desktop to the data center – enabling automated, 24x7, lights-out computing. Additionally, the company has broadened its distribution efforts by making the HP Care Pack Service newly available through select HP channel partners. Industry experts estimate that average server utilization ranges from only 10 to 30 percent. The HP Care Pack Service, based on VMware’s Capacity Planner, is a part of HP Virtualization Assessment Services, which enable customers to make more efficient use of underutilized IT assets, reduce data center operating costs and minimize risks associated with infrastructure changes. “HP’s virtualization technology and services can help customers increase agility and achieve real business benefits by ensuring that IT supply automatically meets business demand,” said Nick van der Zweep, director of virtualization, HP. “With HP Virtualization Assessment Services, we’re bringing customers further along the road to achieving a next-generation data center.” HP has been helping customers virtualize their environments for many years using technologies such as HP Asset and Consolidation Analysis Tools and VMware Capacity Planner. In a typical scenario, utilization data for servers, storage and desktops from both HP and other vendors is collected at the customer’s site over a three- to four-week period. HP Services professionals then make recommendations on how to best consolidate and virtualize their environment, as well as offer a cost justification and sound business rationale for these projects. Using these recommendations, customers can elect to consolidate existing server workloads onto HP Integrity, ProLiant and BladeSystem servers. By using virtualization solutions such as HP Virtual Server Environment for Integrity servers, customers can double their server utilization rates and boost systems administrator productivity by automatically growing and shrinking virtual servers as business needs change. In addition, customers that consolidate using HP Virtualization Assessment Services also can take advantage of added cost savings by leveraging rate reductions passed along to many HP customers by utility companies. For example, Pacific Gas & Electric Co. offers customers that increase energy efficiency in their data centers a rebate of up to $4 million per site consolidation. To reduce the complexity of customers’ storage environments, storage utilization also can be analyzed. Recommendations can then be made on consolidation of storage onto HP StorageWorks XP and EVA disk arrays to address operations and management inefficiencies and create flexible, virtual pools of storage. Additionally, customers using HP Virtualization Assessment Services can get recommendations on virtualizing their heterogeneous desktop environments. HP Thin Clients on the front-end and HP ProLiant or BladeSystem servers or Blade PCs on the back-end can increase data security while decreasing maintenance costs via centralized management and provisioning functions. The new HP Care Pack Service will be available Feb. 1 via HP Services, select HP distributors such as Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions and Avnet, and HP solution providers such as Agilysys. Worldwide availability will expand over the next few months. “We are pleased to be working with HP to help our partners reduce their customers’ data center costs and make more effective use of IT resources,” said Rick Alvarez, vice president and general manager, HP Business Unit, Avnet Technology Solutions, Americas. “Services from HP and Avnet will allow our partners to help enterprise customers drive a faster return on investment as they speed their infrastructure transition to virtual environments.” More information about HP’s virtualization offerings is available at its Web site.