HP Drives Business Growth For Customers Through Virtualization Innovations

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--At VMworld 2009 today, HP announced innovative management and service solutions that extend the benefits of virtualization beyond servers to the entire infrastructure. As a result, customers can maximize resource utilization, improve administrator productivity and drive business growth.

HP also announced the first virtual desktop infrastructure solution for under $1,000 per user seat.  The solution was demonstrated during VMware Chief Executive Officer Paul Maritz's keynote presentation today.

Virtual desktop infrastructure is a server-based computing model that gives users a PC desktop experience, while securing all applications, management and processing in the data center. The HP Virtual Desktop Reference Architecture for VMware View specifically addresses the performance bottlenecks and management complexities of other offerings. Customers can test the solution in select HP solution centers worldwide.

Industry analyst firm IDC predicts that companies will spend nearly $100 billion by 2012 on the management and administration of virtual servers and expects that new virtual server installations will outnumber physical server shipments, starting as early as the end of this year.(2) HP is the first provider to address these challenges by delivering a converged infrastructure that brings together all data center resources, including server, storage, network, I/O, application and desktop.

"Chief information officers need solutions that increase the cost-saving benefits of virtualization while cutting through the complexity and administrative issues caused by virtual sprawl," said Mark Potter, senior vice president and general manager, Infrastructure Software and Blades, HP. "For more than half a decade, HP and VMware have jointly invested in technologies that enable customers to maximize the value of their virtualization efforts. By extending virtualization beyond servers through HP's converged infrastructure solutions, customers can fully realize the potential of their people, applications and technology infrastructure."Only HP can deliver a complete, end-to-end virtualization solution that combines hardware and software to:

    * Cost-effectively deliver a virtual desktop infrastructure that provides increased data protection and uptime. HP's Virtual Desktop Reference Architecture for VMware View also lowers support costs versus traditional PC environments.
    * Lower costs up to 50 percent and improve capacity utilization up to 33 percent by virtualizing storage capacity with HP LeftHand P4000 and other StorageWorks virtualization solutions.

Information pertaining to other new solutions for virtualizing infrastructure is available at http://www.hp.com/go/virtualization.

To help simplify data center management of a virtual and physical infrastructure, and maximize VMware investments, customers need common tools. HP, teamed with VMware, is delivering new capabilities that bridge the physical and virtual data center silos through unified management and automation. Key customer benefits include:

    * Direct administrator access, through VMware vCenter, to the physical infrastructure to manage server health, power use and remote control for the first time with the new HP Insight Control for VMware vCenter.
    * Increased administrator effectiveness with HP Operations Manager for virtualization by monitoring the availability and performance of all virtual and physical assets through a single common dashboard.
    * Reduced risk of downtime with HP Network Automation which, for the first time, gives network administrators control of the VMware vSwitch in addition to the physical network environments.
    * Simplified storage management by monitoring and configuring HP Enterprise Virtual Arrays within a virtual machine using the new HP StorageWorks Command View Enterprise Virtual Array management suite.
    * Simplified and reduced risk of migration to client virtualization with the HP Virtual Client Essentials software portfolio, which includes easy-to-use setup, configuration and management tools for thin clients. This solution also offers a repurposed PC deployment solution and will support VMware's software implementation of PC over IP (PCoIP) protocol.HP provides the experience, breadth of technology, partner ecosystem and services needed to simplify complex virtualization projects, delivering:

    * Improved management of virtualized environments in the data center as a result of a recently signed alliance agreement between EDS, an HP company, and VMware. The agreement brings together EDS data center expertise and VMware virtualization leadership to provide clients with a robust, well-managed virtualized environment.
    * Reduced total cost of ownership and risk by leveraging virtualization best practices with the new HP SAN Readiness Assessment for Server Virtualization and the newly packaged HP Migration Services for VMware vSphere.
    * More optimized partner virtualization solutions for HP BladeSystem hardware with the HP Solution Builder program for BladeSystem than any other systems provider. This program provides testing, technology, marketing and integration services from HP for 334 partners to ensure their solutions maximize the value of HP server platforms.
    * Enhanced network efficiency and lower costs. Together with VMware, HP is leveraging open industry standards such as Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregator (VEPA) to provide a process for virtualizing switches, network interface cards and access points. These can be managed universally to increase visibility, improve traffic control and simplify manageability.