HP’s new ‘consumer-inspired’ infrastructure management tool

• BYOD and increasing business complexity widening gap between business demand and traditional IT supply
• OpenView’s contemporary design delivers familiar workspace and reduces time spent on common tasks

HEWLETT-Packard has unveiled HP OneView, which it described as a ‘consumer-inspired’ infrastructure management platform for its Converged Infrastructure that simplifies the most basic steps that underlay all data centre processes.
 
This allows IT teams to improve operations while reducing costs and manual errors that cause downtime, HP said in a statement.
 
The proliferation of ‘as-a-service’ technology, an influx of tech-savvy workers and an increase in business complexity is widening the gap between business demand and traditional IT supply, HP said.
 
Organisations are now struggling to deliver and manage IT using outdated management tools that were designed for a past era, the company added.
 
“Social media, the consumerisation of IT and changing demographics are altering how work gets done, forcing organisations to address a widening gap between enterprise demands and traditional IT supply,” said Vincent Lee, country manager, Industry Standard Servers and Software, Hewlett-Packard Malaysia.
 
“The current infrastructure management model is stuck in the past and HP OneView is the first step in fundamentally rethinking the entire approach to infrastructure management in the data centre,” he claimed.
 
Designed for the BladeSystem, ProLiant Generation 8 (Gen8) and ProLiant Generation 7 servers, HP OneView is built with server and software technology that offers a single management platform to foster collaboration and communication with IT across the data centre.
 
HP OneView improves the productivity for IT administrators with an intuitive user interface and automated intelligence that simplifies common tasks. The most common data centre processes, such as deployment, updating, migrating and troubleshooting, are reduced from hours or days to minutes, HP claimed.
 
For example, provisioning hypervisors across 16 servers with traditional tools requires two hours and 50 minutes of administrative time, compared to just 14 minutes with HP OneView. The process of retiring a virtual local area network (vLAN) requires only four steps and 30 seconds of administrative time with HP OneView, compared to 480 steps and more than two hours with a traditional tool, based on internal HP tests.
 
21st century spin on data centre management
 
To develop HP OneView, HP said it collaborated with more than 150 leading customers across 30 real-world data centres worldwide over four years to understand the drivers of cost, inefficiencies and delays around the most common infrastructure management tasks, processes and steps.
 
It also examined everyday modern consumer applications that are purpose-built to perform specific tasks with simplicity and speed, and then applied those lessons to the complexity and scale of the data centre.
 
HP OneView delivers unprecedented ease of use so organizations can deploy and manage HP infrastructure faster, with a 42% lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and a 220% return on investment (ROI), the company claimed.
 
The ‘consumer-inspired’ features of HP OneView include:

• Dashboard: Allows users to view the entire data centre in seconds. The view is equally simple whether a customer has 16 devices or 640, and more information is just one click away. With many traditional management tools of today, it can take more than 30 clicks to access the same information.

• Smart Search: Allows administrators to find key information in seconds vs. hunting through online and offline records. Smart Search is built into every task to provide immediate access to the event device, or task information.

• MapView: Examines the relationship between devices, connections and status to help administrators find, triage and fix problems in seconds or minutes.

• Templates: Allows for collaboration by teams within an organisation to capture best IT practices to deploy with speed and accuracy in the future.

• Activity Feed: Provides teams an effective way to communicate as well as a place that combines tasks, hardware alerts and administrative notes into a single view.

Each HP OneView licence includes three years of software and technical support updates. In addition, customers can choose to extend support by purchasing HP Care Packs, which provide services coverage for four or five years to match anticipated hardware usage.
 
HP OneView is immediately available through HP and its worldwide channel partners. Pricing begins at US$799 for a single licence, with three years of technical support and upgrades when also purchasing HP ProLiant server technology.
 
Related Stories:
 
You’ve not seen a rack like this one: HP’s Gen8 servers
                                                                                                                
IT management today is more complex, CA hopes to simplify it
 
Do businesses need to develop a converged infra strategy?
 
                                                                                                      
For more technology news and the latest updates, follow @dnewsasia on Twitter or Like us on Facebook.