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HP Expands Adaptive Infrastructure Portfolio with Integration of VMware vSphere 4

Tuesday 21. April 2009 - HP today announced the integration of VMware vSphere 4 into its HP Adaptive Infrastructure (AI) portfolio.

The integration includes a broad range of related products and services designed to enable customers to change the economics of their technology infrastructures.

Offering the most comprehensive support of VMware vSphere 4, HP is chosen most often by organizations deploying virtual environments and has more servers running VMware ESX technology than any other vendor.(1)

Virtualization can reduce hardware and power costs, but employing separate management strategies for virtual and physical environments, as many organizations do, can increase costs. The HP AI portfolio enables customers to manage both environments simultaneously, deliver dynamic capacity planning and automate provisioning and deployment.

Designed to deliver a business-ready infrastructure, HP AI with VMware vSphere 4 can be delivered across various delivery models – on-premise, as an outsourced offering or via cloud computing – providing customers with improved efficiency, greater control and flexibility of choice. HP customers also benefit from the many years of development between HP and VMware.

The interoperability of VMware vSphere 4 with HP’s portfolio includes:

Offerings to meet the needs of small and midsize businesses, enterprises and cloud computing customers, including VMware Ready Certified hardware platforms ideal for VMware vSphere 4 and a wide choice of HP ProLiant and HP BladeSystem servers and HP StorageWorks systems.
A comprehensive set of tools for both virtual and physical environments through HP Software solutions – such as HP Insight software – that are integrated with VMware vSphere 4.
Seamless management and reduced network costs with HP Virtual Connect, the company’s industry-standard virtual I/O fabric.
Training to help customers maximize their VMware vSphere 4 investments, such as startup, migration, health check, technical support and education services. All of these services are backed by a staff of VMware Certified Professionals that exceeds 800 in number.
“Customers who want to divert more resources toward increasing revenue can rely on the combination of HP products and services and VMware vSphere 4 to deliver a truly business-ready technology infrastructure,” said Paul Miller, vice president, Marketing, Enterprise Storage and Servers, HP. “HP has worked extensively with VMware to develop solutions that help customers realize the full business value of their virtualization technologies from desktop to data center.”

“VMware and HP have a strong relationship that delivers state-of-the-art efficiency, lower capital and operating costs and rich service offerings to our customers, solving real-world business problems,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president and general manager, Server Business Unit, VMware. “With VMware vSphere 4, our combined portfolios will offer simple, packaged solutions that deliver efficient, flexible and reliable IT as a service to meet the most demanding needs of customers of all sizes.”

Reduce costs and increase scalability

HP ProLiant servers, HP BladeSystem servers and HP StorageWorks systems are enhanced with support for VMware vSphere 4.

HP ProLiant and HP BladeSystem servers provide greater customer choice for cost-effective solutions to consolidate existing workloads. As a leader in performance, HP has the highest VMware VMmark two-socket (eight cores) benchmark score in the industry – 23.96 at 16 tiles on an HP ProLiant DL370 G6.(2)
Newly announced HP BladeSystem Matrix is a converged platform for virtualization that pools network, storage and compute resources to optimally meet the demands of hundreds of diverse applications. Organizations using Matrix can lower infrastructure costs, control energy consumption, increase data center flexibility and accelerate productivity and return on investment for their businesses.
HP has certified its complete families of arrays with VMware virtualization technologies. With one of the broadest collections of storage arrays qualified for VMware vSphere 4, HP StorageWorks can meet all needs for storage, particularly in a VMware virtualization environment.
HP LeftHand P4000 SAN Solutions deliver on the enterprise storage requirements for cloud infrastructures, including high availability and scalable performance with no downtime. HP LeftHand P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance Software extends VMware vSphere 4 benefits, such as simplified management and availability, to small and midsize businesses and remote offices cost-effectively.
Simplify management and increase business availability

HP interconnect and infrastructure management offerings integrate with VMware vSphere 4 to create a flexible and cost-effective infrastructure.

HP Virtual Connect enables system administrators to add, replace and recover servers across a data center in minutes without impacting availability. It also virtualizes LAN and SAN connectivity to help organizations increase productivity, respond faster to business demands and reduce operating costs.
HP Insight software addresses capacity-planning issues and provides a comprehensive physical and virtual systems management environment for advanced management of VMware vSphere 4 on HP ProLiant and BladeSystem servers. HP delivers integrated and easy-to-use management for server and storage infrastructure across an entire VMware vSphere 4 environment.
Increased software support for heterogeneous environments

HP has expanded its support for heterogeneous management of virtualized systems via VMware vSphere 4 environments with offerings in the HP Business Technology Optimization (BTO) software portfolio. With HP, customers can extend their existing management systems to better automate, manage and protect their vSphere physical and virtual environments. HP currently supports VMware vSphere 4 with the HP Data Protector offering and plans to support VMware vSphere 4 across the company’s Business Service Automation, Business Service Managemen and IT Service Management software portfolios.

New virtualization services and education offerings

HP has the largest number of VMware-certified professionals supporting heterogeneous environments, so customers can deploy and manage large-scale virtualization implementations with better business outcomes.

HP VMware Support and Education Services help customers efficiently migrate from VMware Infrastructure 3 to VMware vSphere 4 and offer best-practice consolidation and virtualization recommendations. HP also offers installation and startup services and customized training as well as direct access to the HP Response Center for software technical support.

HP is the largest global VMware Authorized Training partner and HP’s VMware Authorized Training Center is the first to train more than 17,000 students on VMware. With the combination of HP’s global presence, remote training delivery infrastructure and expertise with the VMware platform, HP offers effective programs for a broad range of VMware products.