HP has its sights set on swift yet cost-reduction-intense data center transformation projects

Here at the opening keynotes addresses for the HP Technology Forum event at the Mandalay Bay resort in Las Vegas, it's a bigger crowd than I was expecting. Lots of old Unix shops still supporting the legacy and mission critical apps and platforms but on increasingly commoditized hardware ... that increasingly needs better management.

Toss in a surge of interest in virtualization, ongoing ramp-ups to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and a budding fascination in cloud computing methods, and we're looking at the means to accommodate (at lower TCO) all the old and new of IT systems, platforms, framework, applications and delivery services. That takes data center transformation, and not just adding more servers. We also need is the means to manage the complexity, fragility, scale and cost.

HP seems to see this clearly. The goal of data center transformation is clear, but how to get there is another matter.

Opening up the presentations today, Randy Mott, Executive Vice President and CIO, said there are more IT professionals worldwide than ever, and it still growing fast. Unfortunately, the lion's share of these folks are supporting the older systems, and not on innovation.

IT spend as a percent of revenue is too high, he said. And there are so many worthwhile IT objectives that need to be done at the same time. "There's no easy button here," said Mott. You can do anything, but you can't to everything, he told the IT executives and practitioners in the audience. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

HP has gone through an internal IT transformation since 2005, and learned a few lessons, he said. The goal was to cut the percentage of corporate revenue devoted to IT from 4 percent to 2 percent while still delivering better performance. That takes upfront investment but the can be recovered quickly, he said.

To do so you need to cuts costs and change the game, said Mott. HP built 6 massive new modern data centers over three years that indeed changed the game for HP, with 60 percent less electricity use. And those data center replace 85 previous facilities to serve 172,000 employees.

To "change the game" also requires better portfolio management, singular data views and marts, and change management.

The effective transition also requires "transformational" change over "incremental" change, said Mott. These projects need to happen in less then three years and have a significant cost reduction payback.

Next on stage was Ann Livermore, Executive Vice President, HP Technology Solutions Group, saying that CEOs and CIOs are not confident that current data centers will support their businesses past 2010. This is due to information explosion, more demands placed on IT, and reliance on aging infrastructure, she said.

HP now has the number one revenue share of servers spend worldwide, recently beating IBM in that role, said Livermore. One out of every three servers delivered around the world is an HP server, she said.

HP is the sixth largest software company in the world, she added, and the intent to buy EDS will push HP services into a much larger role and set of capabilities.

Transforming the data center builds on HP's core solutions of servers/storage, services, and software, she said. In the future all the IT assets will operate as a single virtual infrastructure, the next next generation data center, in effect, she said.

Livermore also highlighted two announcements this week, the HP Integrity NonStop NB50000c BladeSystem and the BTO Software for Change Management Automation news.

What about HP UX, asked some conference goes? Livermore said HP is committed to HP Unix and Integrity architecture. "We intend to play and play aggressively" on HP UX, she said.

Won't virtualization cut into hardware sales? asked another. Disruption is good for HP, said Livermore, because the management of a combined virtualized environment is the growth of the future, even as blades become the hardware staple.

How to compete against IBM? The EDS merger will allow HP to gain the services staff expertise, scale and outsourcing capabilities to meet the building demand for solutions.

Why EDS? Mark Hurd, HP Chairman and CEO, came on stage to answer. EDS will almost double the services market coverage HP can enjoy, as well as bring more services and automate the EDS services portfolio with HP software, said Hurd. He said he's excited about aligning the EDS and HP competencies.

He's still not sure when the EDS deal closes, however, said Hurd.

Next up, Paul Otellini, Intel president and CEO, came on stage to say how the Intel Itanium archtiecture momentum is building over Spac and PowerPC. Itanium is the fastest growing server chip platform globablly, says IDC, said Otellini.

Intel and HP also work together on total costs of servers, of which maintenance is the higher cost than acquisition cost by far. Intel and HP plan to bring even more powerful blades to market, with high-density, low-power and low-cost computing, said Otellini.

Hurd said the partnership between HP and Intel has never been deeper and wider. He specifically endorsed the HP commitment to Itanium family of processors.

HP marries change management and problem isolation functions into an automated data center efficiency partnership

Borrowing heavily from its Opsware, Mercury and Bristol acquisitions, HP on Tuesday at the Software Universe conference announced products and services designed to automate and coordinate two thorny aspects of large-scale IT operations: change lifecycle management, and problem isolation and resolution.

While once mundane and esoteric aspects of running monolithic data centers, today's scale, complexity and far-flung fragmentation from services orientation have elevated managing change across webs of servers and components to a top priority. What we're really getting at here is making IT perform like a mature, refined and managed business function, not a near-sighted firefighting brigade.

In many cases, operators and IT executives are forbidding that requested changes can be made to services and applications for fear that the changes will stir up hard-to-locate and tough-to-remedy glitches. Such unintended consequences can be scattered across thousands of distributed servers and IT network devices. It's hard to enjoy the fruits of service oriented architecture (SOA) investments for business agility when the IT infrastructure is too brittle to accept applications-level change readily.

So in anticipation of dampening further hamstrung agility advances due to "brittle environments" -- particularly as SOA, virtualization and cloud computing come into play -- HP's Business Technology Optimization (BTO) and research teams have assembled what amounts to IT change confidence enhancement tools. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

A recent study by The Economist research unit showed that some 50 percent of service outages in data centers was due to a change being made to a service. Then these problems were hard to isolate given that no one knew how the change impacted the distributed systems. From there, some 68 percent of companies responding said the applications issues were being tackled manually.

Obviously HP sees a huge opportunity here for making modern data centers behave more like assets and less like liabilities, at least in the eyes of business managers as they seek process and strategic initiatives changes.

So not only does the confidence to change services and processes freely amid SOA-supported processes need a boost, the ability to manage change requires automated lifecycle depth and breadth. Uncoordinated and manual attempts to manage change amid widespread complexity can actually make the problems and their resolution harder. Next generation data centers require an end-to-end services deployment and change management capability that maps to service workflow orchestration, services management and datacenter automation activities.

So the HP BTO and adaptive infrastructure engineers have designed HP Release Control 4.0, which identifies "change collisions" and creates a managed services approach to change. The solution not only manages technology, it manages the people managing the IT via providing advance visibility into change impacts and organizing teams so changes are coordinated.

The value does not end at the proactive stage of change management, but provides the tools to identify change-related issues over the lifetime of the services, said Sharmila Shahani, chief marketing officer of HP Software. "This provides a proactive, real-time and automated way to manage the change lifecycle," said Shahani, in an interview.

Additionally, HP has announced Business Availability Center (BAC) 7.5 for improved problem management in complex datacenter environments. Using new technology from HP Labs, the product helps isolate runtime problems before disruptions by allowing fast and visual "drilling down" into operations data regardless of scale and complexity.

Other new product releases here at Software Universe this week include: HP Client Automation Center 7.2, HP Storage Essentials 6.0, and HP Service Automation Reporter 7.0.

What's interesting to me is that HP is using he change management-focused Release Control functions in association with the BAC problem resolution functions, getting into a data center dance of efficiency. As the change piece and the problem identification piece are used in unison, a "closed loop" approach to datacenter performance amid constant change becomes possible, said Shahani.

I did a podcast interview just yesterday at the HP Technology Forum event in Las Vegas in these issues with Duncan Campbell, HP's Adaptive Infrastructure program leader. Have a listen. More podcasts from Software Universe are here.

Further burnishing the datacenter efficiency shine, HP has also updated its configuration management database (CMDB) system to embrace federation and ITIL v3 principles. Universal Configuration Management (CMS) 7.5 allows for many versions of configuration data from many sources to be used in unison for improved visibility and access for what's going on in as many of the systems as possible in nar real-time.

HP's latest CMDB does not force all the config data into a common CMDB, but rather uses connectors to other CMDBs for true federation on a meta data level, said Shahani, to provide a hub and consolidated view of all components within a large distributed system. Universal CMS 7.5 arrives this month.

HP is targeting the aggregated view of all systems elements value from the new CMDB at the burgeoning use of virtualization across datacenters. Virtualization promises utilization efficiencies and automated provisioning of services and applications support, but it also adds complexity as support infrastructure and application instances can pop in and out of use (existence?).

What I especially like about these new products is that they can increasingly be used in association with SOA governance and SLAs to begin to get to a true services lifecycle approach value and benefit. Used in association with HP SOA Center (including the Systinet repository), architects can integrate design and governance demands with change management, problem management and federated systems config data for a whole significantly larger than the sum of the parts.

It's just these kinds of complete services management capabilities, increasingly automated, that will make SOA pay off big dividends and paves the way for use of private cloud compute environs for enterprises and service providers alike.

Interview: HP's Duncan Campbell on energy efficiency and automation in next generation data centers

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Enterprises are now energized to save energy, and HP's Adaptive Infrastructure program leader, Duncan Campbell, believes the path to automation and efficiency -- plus the need for modernization and consolidation -- present a '"perfect storm" for next generation data center architecture adoption.

I had a chance to interview Campbell yesterday at the Technology Forum event in Las Vegas after HP's NonStop Blade servers announcement. I asked him how the simultaneous factors of hardware improvements, virtualization, improved change management, and IT service management -- not to mention SOA and cloud computing -- can come together without overwhelming IT leaders and operators.

Listen to the podcast for more on HP's plans and philosophy on what the next generation data center and adaptive infrastructure approaches will means for lowering costs while also improving scale and response.

Incidentally, this is the first in a series of HP executive interviews as podcasts I'll be doing this week from the HP Software Universe conference. See the full list here.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Disparate HP user communities unite under Connect banner at HP Technology Forum event

HP is an amalgamation of companies, products and technologies, and its user groups have had a similar legacy. Until today, that is.

Three major HP-focused user groups, from as long ago as Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) and Tandem Systems days, have banded together to ride the power of social networking to provide a unified and more powerful voice to 50,000 global users managing and maintaining old and new HP products and systems.

The new group, called Connect, will allow its users to share knowledge and contacts while proving a strong customer advocacy voice to HP, said Nina Buik, president of the new non-profit Connect and a prolific blogger. She's also senior vice president at MindIQ, an Atlanta-based technology training company.

By officially banding together today, the former Encompass (once DECUS), HP-Interex EMEA and ITUG communities can gain more power and influence together while still remaining independent of HP.

"There's just more power in numbers, you can more done," said Buik.

Connect made a splash at the HP Technology Forum event, which began Monday in Las Vegas. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.] Users, members and observers toasted the advent of the group at a food and libations fest at the Mandalay Bay resort.

The Connect community reflects users of all of HP's portfolio, which covers a lot of ground from DEC's PDP apps still running in emulation in surprising numbers to the VMS and OpenVMS of old to the latest NonStop, BTO and SOA Center product suites. The unified community is at the outset strongest in the U.S. and EMEA, but will seek more presence in Asia/Pacific and Japan later this year, said Buik.

Connect will hold its next major user event Nov. 10-12 in Manheim, Germany.

Hey, while we're at it integrating communities -- just as we're integrating products and technologies -- why not go for some user and communities federation as well? The HP Software community Vivit, for example, or perhaps some open source communities would make sense to work in tandem with Connect. The large and growing VMWare community also has obvious synergies with Connect.

Furthermore, Connect is leveraging the social media and networks trend by creating what amounts to a LinkedIn or Facebook for HP users on its site at . Users can create a profile that describes their HP product sets, which then heightens their ability to reach out to other similar users and create their social user groups and relationships. There's blogs and wikis, too. If it works for social activities, it works for business activities.

HP is hoping to tap the Connect community for its own market research, a massive feedback loop perpetual focus group on the wants and demands of HP users. The power of the pen, folks -- it's even ore powerful when joined with social networks functions and viral community reach.

'Instant replay' helps software developers fast-forward to application problem areas

Fixing software bugs is often easier than finding them. Stepping up to the plate to address this problem is Replay Solutions, which today announced general availability of ReplayDIRECTOR for Java EE, a TiVo-like product that allows instant replays of applications and servers at any stage of the application lifecycle.

ReplayDIRECTOR, which was released in beta by the Redwood City, Calif. company in March, makes deep recordings of applications and servers -- notably non-deterministic inputs and events that affect the application. Engineers can then fast forward directly to the root cause of the problem.

The idea behind the technology is that it allows companies to drill down into source code quickly, eliminating unnecessary IT costs and time spent searching for issues that can't be replicated or easily detected. The software is designed to cut through the complexity that IT departments face with shorter release cycles, multi-tier applications, and dispersed development teams.

According to Replay Solutions, every line of code that an application executes while ReplayDIRECTOR is recording will be re-executed in precisely the same sequence during playback. No source code changes are required and recordings can be played anywhere, without requiring the original environment, inputs, databases, or other servers, all of which are virtualized during replay.

As virtualization becomes more common, these replay approaches may be necessary as instances of apps and runtimes may come and go based on automated demand response provisioning. These left-over breadcrumbs of what once happened in a virtualization container will be quite valuable to then prevent recurrences.

I'm sure innovative developers and testers will come up with other interesting uses, especially as apps and services become supported in more places, inside and outside of enterprises. Got compliance?

Designed to deploy in any environment and have a minimal effect on the environment, ReplayDIRECTOR allows applications to run at near full speed while recording and faster than full speed during re-execution. It also has minimal performance impact, and can run in a production environments as an "always on" solution.

ReplayDIRECTOR for Java EE is available now. You can find more information at the company's Web site.