Thursday, 29 June 2006

HP Expands Virtualization Capabilities for HP Integrity Servers

IT virtualization continues to grow at significant growth rate and spending on it is expected to reach USD 15 billion by 2009 (according to IDC). To take advantage of this growth of virtualization and the high rate deployment of Oracle databases on its integrity servers Hewlett-Packard has announced an extension of its Virtual Server...

IT virtualization continues to grow at significant growth rate and spending on it is expected to reach USD 15 billion by 2009 (according to IDC). To take advantage of this growth of virtualization and the high rate deployment of Oracle databases on its integrity servers Hewlett-Packard has announced an extension of its Virtual Server Environment (VSE) for HP Integrity servers that will let customers to automatically adjust resources within a pooled server environment.

The new HP VSE Reference Architecture for Oracle Real Application Clusters for HP-UX 11i dynamically scales the Integrity server infrastructure when mission-critical Oracle database workloads fluctuate. For example, customers can use the capability to automatically allocate additional server capacity to financial applications during the month-end close.

HP has integrated its Serviceguard for HP-UX 11i with HP Integrity Virtual Machines for customers that are concerned about the availability of their mission-critical UNIX environments when they consolidate using virtualization. HP said this functionality helps guard against failure by automatically moving the virtual machines between servers in a VSE. HP Integrity Virtual Machines also now enables easy manual migration of virtual machines, accelerating application qualification and deployment.

Nick van der Zweep, director, Virtualization and Integrity Server Software, HP claimed, "No other vendor can offer the level of virtualization capability for Oracle customers that HP now can."

He added, "HP leads the way in mission-critical server virtualization with HP-UX 11i, now enabling customers to automatically flex, add and move server resources in support of constantly changing business demands."

HP said with the growth in demand for virtualization, it has experience a 70 percent shipment growth for key virtualization technologies in the past year.

HP’s customer Royal London claims that by consolidating its HP infrastructure via HP virtualization technologies, it is now able to nimbly respond to changing workloads while saving almost USD 200,000 in the process. Clive Cranshaw, technical administrator, Royal London said, "We have benefited enormously from our IT staff being able to focus on adding value to the business, while the HP Integrity Virtual Machines allocate and manage server resources automatically and keep our users productive."

Available since 2003, the HP VSE is a foundational element in HP’s Adaptive Infrastructure framework, which enables customers to move toward an automated 'lights-out' computing environment that can be remotely managed 24 hours a day.