HP Accelerates Shark ConvergedSystems Provisioning With OneView Automation Hub

Hewlett-Packard Monday unveiled its OneView Automation Hub, which is designed to deliver big gains in converged systems provisioning and management for its HP Shark systems.

HP said the new Automation Hub, which was unveiled at the HP Discover Conference in Las Vegas, would drive six times faster provisioning for its Shark ConvergedSystems.

"The HP OneView software is an automation machine," said Tom Joyce, senior vice president and general manager of HP ConvergedSystems Sharks. "A lot of channel partners have thought of converged systems as hardware bundles. The real differentiator comes with software. You cannot create a hardware bundle that does what the combination of Sharks and HP OneView will do. It's great to see customers deploying this and seeing the time and money savings."

[Related: HP Unleashes 12 New Enterprise Products At HP Discover ]

One dramatic example of the savings: a large financial institution that created a OneView automation template that reduced the time it would take to carry out a complex VMware deployment from a 66-day plan over seven consecutive weekends to a single day job, said Joyce. "That's just one example," he said. "We are going to see many, many more cases like that."

HP's own testing showed that the new OneView 1.10 with the Automation Hub software reduced the time it takes to deploy 32 server clusters on HP ProLiant Blades with 3Par 7200 storage arrays and Brocade switches from 16 hours of an IT administrator's time to just 2.5 hours.

OneView version 1.10 marks the first time that HP has leveraged the converged software-defined management platform to completely automate HP compute, networking and storage including HP 3Par storage arrays on its Shark ConvergedSystems.

To that end, HP has combined OneView with its ConvergedSystem 300 and 700 Shark Virtualization systems. HP said the software addition reduces IT operational expenses by up to three times and provides two times the performance of comparable offerings.

The new hub automation software also opens the door for partners to consolidate management across a wide array of virtualized environments with out-of-the-box integration with VMware vCenter and vCloud, Microsoft System Center and the Red Hat Enterprise management environment.

In fact, HP said solution providers could manage infrastructure from the management console of their choice but still benefit from the automation and management capabilities provided by OneView.

"For the first time HP has completely integrated the ConvergedSystem hardware with the management and application software," said Al Chien, executive vice president of Dasher Technologies, a Campbell, Calif.-based HP Platinum partner. "HP's decision to focus on industry standards and partner closely with VMware, Microsoft and SAP is ingenious. This is HP's time to shine.

"HP has a ton of trusted value relationships in the solutions stack with vendors like VMware, Microsoft and SAP," he said. "Those are long and trusted partnerships. This isn't the time for anyone to bet against HP."

PUBLISHED JUNE 9, 2014