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IT Is Becoming All About The API: Page 2 of 2

Of course, HP has been in systems management for years. The company has a long history of integrating its own and other vendors' equipment. In fact, HP claims to manage Cisco's equipment better than Cisco. While I'll leave that comment alone, the fact is that HP's acquisition of H3C netted it a new management platform for the A series of data center switches. HP has been busy integrating existing management software and building new software to automate nearly every aspect of your data center, from the hardware to software deployment and configuration. HP's integration and management software has more moving parts than UCS, which many view as a problem, but HP has more software management products that, combined, can do more than just manage hardware. What I'd like to see, or hear, from users is their experiences using HP's software stack for a fully automated app deployment--that is, a private cloud.

Few data centers are truly single-vendor shops. You may be standardized on single switch vendor, a single server vendor or whatever, but no vendor has everything you need to run a data center.

What's changing is the demand for faster IT provisioning of resources. Spinning up a virtual machine is just one aspect. The VM has to be brought up on a hypervisor with available power and networking; the application may have to be added to a load balancer; it may have to be added to the firewall rules, it may need to tickle a CMDB and do a number of other things just to get into a ready state. The more open, simple and robust the APIs, the easier it will be to integrate products.

Disclosure: I went to the Valley on my company's dime. Cisco bought me lunch in the cafeteria for $6.34. HP and Juniper gave me water.