(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — IT firm Hewlett-Packard (www.hp.com) announced on Wednesday it is has launched the HP Converged Infrastructure Architecture and a set of related services and partner offerings that create a virtualized, on-demand data center.
The move is seen as a counter response to rival Cisco’s announcement Tuesday in which the company launched an alliance with EMC and VMware entitled Virtual Computing Environment coalition.
The Cisco-EMC-VMware alliance could potentially rival HP and IBM with its combination of storage, security and virtualization capabilities that integrate into Cisco Unified Computing System.
The HP Converged Infrastructure Architecture completely virtualizes compute, storage, networking and management resources in the data center, unifying them all under common management.
The company will use several HP technologies to accomplish this, including BladeSystem Matrix, FlexFabric and Virtual Resource Pools.
HP says it will provision modular standards-based systems on-demand by using its Virtual Resource Pool technology. This will provide support for its enterprise, cloud and high performance computing applications.
The company’s Virtual Resource Pools is supported by HP’s StorageWorks systems. This includes the new StorageWorks X9000 Network Storage System series, which can scale up to 16PB of capacity in a single namespace or virtual file system capacity.
The X9000 is offered in three models, including the 2U rack-mount system X9300 Network Storage Gateway, the midrange X9320 Network Storage Systems, and the X9720 Network Storage System which can store petabytes of file-based data for larger applications.
The HP Converged Infrastructure Architecture also includes the new StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform version 3.0.
The platform includes a back-end LUN provisioning service, which automatically generates SVSP storage pools from capacity provisioned across multiple StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Arrays.
The StorageWorks SVPSP improves capacity utilization through the configuration of virtualized pools of storage and the application of thin provisioning.
Finally, HP is also set to release StorageWorks Cluster Extension EVA software integrated with Microsoft Hyper-V Live Migrationk, which lets users dynamically move both applications and storage across the data center for disaster recovery.
