New hardware, new services in an everything-but-the-humans offering
Hewlett-Packard Co. is now doing what Sears, Roebuck and Co., once did: It's not only offering its customers new appliances, it's selling the house to put them in. The house, in HP's case, is a data center; the vendor is making data center design and consulting part of a broader portfolio of customer services.
HP is offering itself up as a primary data center contractor to customers, a direction made possible through its acquisition of EYP Mission Critical Facilities Inc. in February. EYP focused on consulting and designing services for data centers and other technology-intensive uses.
As part of this offering, announced Monday, HP said it would ship in May its largest x86 server yet -- the eight-socket ProLiant DL785, equipped with quad-core Opteron chips from Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
This is HP's largest x86 server, supporting up to 256GB of memory, said John Bennett, worldwide director of Data Center Transformation, the new service. He said it is important to increase hardware capabilities as part of an effort to improve data center operations.
"If we are going to be encouraging customers to consolidate and virtualize their environment, we need to be able to do that for their scale-up applications," he said.
Building a new data center is only one aspect of HP's data center transformation initiative. The effort includes a broad range of services and software intended to help companies optimize their IT, retrofit their data centers if needed, and get more use out of the infrastructure. It includes new software called HP Insight Dynamics that, the company said, analyzes and optimizes physical and virtual resources in the same way. There are also new automation tools in its HP Operations Orchestration system.
HP says it is being driven by a number of business trends. The company released its own independent study of data center needs this month. In it, HP interviewed 161 business and technology executives, with 75% from firms with more than 1,000 employees. More than a third of the respondents indicated that their data centers will be incapable of meeting business needs in 2 to 5 years.
That finding is indirectly supported by a study last year by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which estimated that the rate at which computers and data centers use power will double nationally in five years. But analysts say HP is also responding to competitive pressure.
Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT Inc. in Hayward, Calif., said HP is the market leader in four-socket systems and below, but realizes that with the release of Windows Server 2008, as well as the increasing importance of x86 servers in the enterprises, it will need an eight-socket system to compete.
Brad Day, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., called HP's offering "the first missile" in the effort to create something similar to what IBM has in their global technology services offering. "I think that HP is probably responding to that because they (IBM) are starting to have quite a bit of success," said Day.
But Day said the data center all-in-one offerings from enterprise vendors can be a plus for customers, because the enterprise vendors serve as prime contractors. Customers today are dealing with an assortment of different engineering, power and cooling, and other suppliers to build or retrofit data centers. "The more of that that is handled by a prime contractor, the better it is," he said.
Hewlett-Packard Co. is now doing what Sears, Roebuck and Co., once did: It's not only offering its customers new appliances, it's selling the house to put them in. The house, in HP's case, is a data center; the vendor is making data center design and consulting part of a broader portfolio of customer services.
HP is offering itself up as a primary data center contractor to customers, a direction made possible through its acquisition of EYP Mission Critical Facilities Inc. in February. EYP focused on consulting and designing services for data centers and other technology-intensive uses.
As part of this offering, announced Monday, HP said it would ship in May its largest x86 server yet -- the eight-socket ProLiant DL785, equipped with quad-core Opteron chips from Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
This is HP's largest x86 server, supporting up to 256GB of memory, said John Bennett, worldwide director of Data Center Transformation, the new service. He said it is important to increase hardware capabilities as part of an effort to improve data center operations.
"If we are going to be encouraging customers to consolidate and virtualize their environment, we need to be able to do that for their scale-up applications," he said.
Building a new data center is only one aspect of HP's data center transformation initiative. The effort includes a broad range of services and software intended to help companies optimize their IT, retrofit their data centers if needed, and get more use out of the infrastructure. It includes new software called HP Insight Dynamics that, the company said, analyzes and optimizes physical and virtual resources in the same way. There are also new automation tools in its HP Operations Orchestration system.
HP says it is being driven by a number of business trends. The company released its own independent study of data center needs this month. In it, HP interviewed 161 business and technology executives, with 75% from firms with more than 1,000 employees. More than a third of the respondents indicated that their data centers will be incapable of meeting business needs in 2 to 5 years.
That finding is indirectly supported by a study last year by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which estimated that the rate at which computers and data centers use power will double nationally in five years. But analysts say HP is also responding to competitive pressure.
Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT Inc. in Hayward, Calif., said HP is the market leader in four-socket systems and below, but realizes that with the release of Windows Server 2008, as well as the increasing importance of x86 servers in the enterprises, it will need an eight-socket system to compete.
Brad Day, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., called HP's offering "the first missile" in the effort to create something similar to what IBM has in their global technology services offering. "I think that HP is probably responding to that because they (IBM) are starting to have quite a bit of success," said Day.
But Day said the data center all-in-one offerings from enterprise vendors can be a plus for customers, because the enterprise vendors serve as prime contractors. Customers today are dealing with an assortment of different engineering, power and cooling, and other suppliers to build or retrofit data centers. "The more of that that is handled by a prime contractor, the better it is," he said.
