Convergence is becoming the new mantra for the IT companies looking to stay ahead of competition in a highly competitive market place. And to take first mover advantage in this space, the world?s largest IT company ? Hewlett Packard (HP) ? has taken a deep plunge, launching a slew of new solutionss, all aimed at improving the delivery mechanism for companies by offering one-stop solution for all their IT needs.

At a conference in Las Vegas last week, HP delivered what it promised to its customers ? several industry-first converged infrastructure solutions that improve enterprise agility by simplifying deployment and speeding IT delivery. The solutions touch all aspects of a connected environment right from servers, storage, networking to cloud environment with hybrid solutions for enterprise. In every space HP has come out with new solutions and products aimed at optimising operations of customers and provide a converged environment.

To take its efforts forward, HP will not only offer full consultancy services for all its new solutions right from inception to commissioning to customers, but also offer an attractive financing model to provide customers the ability to acquire its choice of solution in a utility-like monthly payment, especially for sourcing storage products. The list of offerings includes converged systems, a new portfolio of turnkey, optimised and converged hardware, software, tailored consulting and HP solution support services that enable clients to be up and running with new applications in hours against months required earlier. In addition, HP has also announced converged storage architecture and portfolio, which integrates HP Store360 scale-out software with HP BladeSystem and HP ProLiant hardware to reduce storage administration, speed time to service delivery, increase energy efficiency and improve access for any data type or application workload. The offerings are complemented by new storage consulting services.

Making a significant offering to how data centres are run by enterprises, HP has also announced the launch of HP POD 240a, also referred to as the ?HP EcoPOD. The new EcoPOD reduces cost for clients and provides a modular option for customers looking to upgrade or expand their data centres.

The company also announced a new HP server automation 9.1 software, which seamlessly provisions physical and virtual application instances across the entire life cycle. It will offer automated server life cycle management for enterprise servers and applications for both converged and traditional environments. With new integrated database automation, it offers a single tool that enables IT to significantly reduce the time it takes to achieve full application life cycle automation. ?HP is working with a strategy to all the present and future needs of its customers. The strategy for tomorrow is to optimise traditional environment, build and manage cloud architechture and enable seamless transformation to hybrid environment. The aim is to define and deliver the connected world from consumers to enterprises,? said HP president and CEO Leo Apotheker. As part of its exercise to widen cloud offering, HP also announced that it is making up to $2 billion available to help clients finance their way to the cloud. This offering is made possible by HP Financial Services, the company?s leasing and asset management subsidiary.

Earlier, the company announced extension of its hybrid delivery solutions portfolio, so that enterprises can improve their agility and quickly respond to changing customer and citizen needs. Hybrid delivery environments, which combine traditional IT infrastructures with private and public clouds, enable enterprise agility by using flexible delivery models to best meet changing market demands. Under this model, HP CloudSystem will offer dual bursting capability to help clients manage uneven demands. This innovation allows clients to provision and dynamically scale resources up and down either via a public cloud provider or through an onsite pay-as-you-go cloud model. In addition, to enable service providers to take advantage of the rapidly growing cloud market, HP also announced HP CloudAgile, a comprehensive programme that spans the full HP enterprise portfolio including, CloudSystem. To speed time to revenue and improve financial flexibility for a broad range of service providers, the programme provides participants with direct access to HP?s global sales force and its worldwide network of channel partners, as well as opportunities to deliver new cloud services.

?The provision of an efficient public cloud will be of particular interest to small and medium enterprises looking to otimise their services and delivery without any adding up the cost. The product and services on offer here by HP will be of particular interest to clients in Asia Pacific region and in India that will be our focus once public clud is formally launched soon,? said Steven Dietch, vice-president marketing, cloud solutions and infrastructure, HP.

HP also lauched new products in the networking area to challenge the leadership position of its arch rival Cisco. The networking area has not seen much innovation in past years giving ample opportunity to HP to tap this segment especially with its new range of switches that can manage an entire network of multiple vendors with a single tool.

(Travel for report was sponsored by HP)

Unveils ?most efficient? modular data centre

HP has unveiled what it cliams to be the world?s most efficient modular data centre that can be deployed faster than any such offering ? in just 12 weeks ? and at a quarter of the cost when compared to a traditional brick-and-mortar data centre. The new data centre, the HP POD 240a ? also referred to as the ?HP EcoPOD ? has 95% better efficiency than any other data centre. ?The HP POD 240a offers a reduction in capital investment costs, saving clients as much as $24.7 million over building a traditional 1.2 MW data centre,? said Dave Donatelli, HP executive vice-president and general manager enterprise, servers, storage, networking. A unique adaptive cooling technology developed in part by HP Labs, the company?s central research facility, enables clients to intelligently optimise energy savings based on IT load, climate and policy by automatically adjusting cooling methods, including using outside air.