HP Unveils Virtualisation Solutions For Cloud Environment

HP has announced new virtualisation software solutions that simplify, automate and secure the movement of virtual machines (VMs) and data in cloud environments, providing clients with increased agility for addressing dynamic market opportunities.

In legacy infrastructures, moving a VM workload such as a Microsoft Exchange application between datacentres requires hundreds of complex, manual device-level configuration steps. Data mobility is similarly challenging because storage requires a physical deployment that consumes floor space, power, cooling and infrastructure investment, which locks clients into a proprietary environment.

New HP Converged Infrastructure solutions help to eliminate these issues, delivering increased agility and simplicity. HP Ethernet Virtual Interconnect (EVI) is a solution to simplify and speed the interconnectivity of up to eight geographically dispersed datacentres in minutes, eliminating manual configuration tasks.

HP Multitenant Device Context (MDC) software delivers increased security for multitenant cloud applications, eliminating the comingling of data from different applications or departments.

HP StoreVirtual virtual storage appliance (VSA) increases flexibility by allowing clients to easily build storage pools on any x86 server using VMware vSphere or Windows Server Hyper-V hypervisors. As a result, clients can move data across heterogeneous servers, hypervisors and datacentre locations to better meet organisation needs, while reducing overall cost and complexity.

“Clients are seeking a more flexible virtualised environment that enables mobility of virtual machines and data services across the enterprise,” said Prakash Krishnamoorthy, country manager, HP Networking, India. “HP’s unique virtualisation technologies meet that need, helping clients to significantly increase their agility and innovate at a pace their organisations demand.”

HP EVI is a Data Center Interconnect overlay technology that enables “single touch” connection of up to eight datacentres around the world from one location. Clients can optimise server and storage resources to perform workload mobility or disaster recovery by linking the software in HP EVI from one datacentre to another.

With HP MDC software, clients can create multiple, secure and isolated functions for organisational departments such as finance, human resources and engineering, while reducing the number of networking devices in the datacentre by 75 percent. Combining HP EVI with HP MDC simplifies datacentre interconnectivity while reducing total cost of ownership by 56 percent with a single management platform.

To address flexibility and cost, many organisations have moved from physical storage deployments to VSAs and VM-based data services to support new application workloads and rapid data growth. However, most VSA software is proprietary, supporting only a single vendor’s hardware and hypervisor.

HP StoreVirtual VSA is the first software-based virtual storage appliance to operate on any x86 server, while connecting to a range of third-party external storage solutions and supporting a mix of VMware vSphere and Windows Server Hyper-V hypervisors simultaneously. This heterogeneous, hardware-agnostic solution for delivering shared storage in virtualised environments eliminates vendor lock-in, reduces infrastructure cost by up to 60 percent and increases utilisation without additional investment.