Running an IT department means overseeing numerous parts — from servers to network to application development.
Hewlett-Packard Co. has assembled a cluster of solutions it believes can build what it dubs the Orchestrated Datacenter to meet infrastructure and application delivery requirements.
The company said this week the suites — a mix of new and existing software to be released next month — are an automation and cloud-management solution that helps businesses optimize data centre operations.
This includes orchestrating the full stack—from physical, virtual servers, networks, storage and databases to the middleware and the application layer—and automating end-to-end IT workflows across the service desk, monitoring and security operations, HP said.
IT teams can design, customize and deploy these services securely in test and production, as well as across traditional, private and public cloud environments.
“IT organizations must sharpen their focus from just managing servers and infrastructure to orchestrating the delivery of end to end services and applications that help differentiate businesses in the market,” HP’s Ajay Singh, senior vice-president and general manager of IT Operations Management, Software, said in a statement “The Orchestrated Datacenter empowers customers to orchestrate across the entire operations cycle ensuring timely delivery of infrastructure and application services with consistency, compliance and reliability.”
As a part of the vision HP said it will release Enterprise Maps, an Archimate 2 certified enterprise architecture solution which can identify infrastructure that need to be deconstructed or reconstructed and services that need to be re-architected or migrated to cloud environments. The result, HP says in a statement, “is an actionable cloud transformation roadmap.” Enterprise Maps also allows enterprise architects to plan, translate and map the business requirements to existing and new services, ensuring that business needs are met as the end-to-end services are created and managed, HP said.
As part of the packages updated versions of existing software were announced, including Cloud Service Automation (CSA) 4.1, Operations Orchestration (OO)10.1 and Server Automation (SA) 10.1. (A community edition of Operations Orchestration is available here)
Combined, HP said these will let customers easily manage virtual machine deployments in OpenStack and public cloud environments including operating system provisioning, patching, software deployment and compliance management using the HP SA policy models.
HP Cloud Service Automation will help application-development and IT teams by automatically importing Chef Recipes at the time of service definition using flexible service modeling and design. Chef is an open-source standard for defining application and system configurations.
HP (NYSE: HPC) says its solutions include out-of-the-box support of Chef Recipes, with more than 300 application patterns across every component of IT service (traditional, private and public) across legacy and distributed applications including Hadoop and no-SQL databases like MongoDB, CouchDB and Hbase.
End users will be able to select and order multiple service offerings at one time from the HP CSA catalog. This also supports aggregated pricing and individual subscription service management.
HP Server Automation enables IT to measure and report the value delivered to the lines of business customers from within a new Automation Insight capability in SA. This unifies reporting across products and data sources to measure the status of IT automation, as well as the state of compliance, server operations and frequency of updates across the data center, HP said.
