HP announces next-generation portfolio of software and services

Social networking, mobility, big data and cloud services are changing the role of IT from infrastructure support to acting as a driver of business growth through rapid delivery of services and application releases. However, managing complex distributed systems and heterogeneous environments is time-consuming and hinders agility and innovation.

HP is introducing a comprehensive, integrated portfolio of software and services that helps to automate the complete life cycle of IT services - from routine data centre maintenance to the delivery of business processes. By automating repetitive, manual and time-consuming operations, the automation and cloud management software from HP minimises complexities in heterogeneous environments and allows IT to focus on higher-impact activities to increase the overall value for the business.

HP's automation, orchestration and cloud management software solutions provide the essential foundation for delivering application and infrastructure services, which enables clients to:

• Drive business growth by quickly deploying innovative IT services on a massive scale with HP Operations Orchestration (OO) 10, which automates the execution of up to 15 000 simultaneous operations.
  
• Lower IT costs by efficiently delivering computing capacity with HP Server Automation (SA) 10, which automates server life cycle management to increase utilisation, while reducing manual administration.
  
• Increase employee efficiency with HP Database and Middleware Automation (DMA) 10, which automates manual database management tasks.
  
• Accelerate time to value of IT services with HP Cloud Service Automation 3.2, which provides service life cycle automation, utilisation and financial management capabilities to accurately and efficiently manage and scale cloud services.

"Our IT employees were bogged down being enterprise 'fire fighters' instead of proactive business partners," said Andy Smith, vice-president, application hosting services, McKesson. "HP cloud and automation software enabled us to improve our IT operations by automating routine, repetitive tasks prone to human error, encouraging our employees to focus on innovative IT services. As a result, we can now deliver both IaaS and PaaS in under an hour, and we reduced IT service outages by 78%, the occurrence of critical IT incidents by 65% and have been able to deploy 40% more IT systems."

HP OO 10 reduces the time needed to build and deploy business processes-on premises or via the cloud-from weeks to minutes by automating all application and infrastructure runbooks.By automating IT runbooks on a massive scale, HP OO 10 can rapidly deliver infrastructure capacity when needed and automates application services that rely on heterogeneous components.

In addition, HP OO 10 speeds time to value with out-of-the-box support for more than 5000 IT operations, including new support for Amazon S3 Storage, HP ArcSight, HP Fortify, OpenStack and SAP applications. This enables IT organisations to automate their business processes quickly and easily.

Enterprise-grade server life cycle management platform

The HP SA 10 enterprise-grade server life cycle management platform allows IT to manage more than 100 000 physical and virtual servers(2) from a single pane of glass to eliminate management complexity. It also improves operational economics by reducing the administrator-to-server ratio by up to 60%.

In addition, HP SA 10 offers HP Server Automation Standard, a virtual appliance that allows smaller organisations and department-level IT teams to begin managing server environments in less than one hour. By automating management of the server life cycle, enterprises can speed software deployment from weeks to hours and the deployment of entire server stacks from days to minutes for rapid return on investment.

HP DMA 10 software automates up to 60% of the manual, repetitive administrative tasks associated with database management. It can improve administrator efficiency by more than 70% with more than 1000 out-of-the-box best practices to provision, patch, upgrade and release application code into database and middleware servers, such as DB2,Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase and WebSphere. New out-of-the-box compliance reports enable enterprises to access the critical information needed quickly, to meet regulations for database management.

HP Cloud Service Automation 3.2 is a comprehensive, unified cloud management platform for building, brokering and managing enterprise-grade application and heterogeneous infrastructure cloud services. HP Cloud Service Automation 3.2 simplifies management of heterogeneous environments by leveraging HP OO and HP SA while providing support for Amazon EC2 public cloud services, HP Cloud Services, KVM OpenStack and Microsoft Hyper-V.

Integration with HP DMA offers self-service portals for Database-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service environments that deliver end-to-end IT application services.

Integration with HP Business Service Management allows HP Cloud Service Automation 3.2 to manage system and application service performance in private and hybrid cloud environments. HP Cloud Service Automation 3.2 also contributes to improved efficiency with intelligent resource allocation and provides chargeback capabilities with HP Asset Manager. Leveraging HP IT Executive Scorecard, HP Cloud Service Automation 3.2 provides a 360-degree dashboard view of cloud and hybrid IT investments for business planning.

Develop strategies for product implementation

HP Software Professional Services help customers develop strategies for product implementation to facilitate rapid return on software investments. HP provides Foundation Services, HP CloudMaps and HP QuickPacks that are designed to enable customers to implement new automation and cloud solutions quickly, while helping to reduce risks and maintain performance. For complex data centre scenarios, HP offers advanced services to help customers implement sophisticated capabilities. HP also offers educational services that enable customers to gain the skills to maximise productivity and the solutions' adoption.

HP OO 10, HP SA 10, HP DMA 10 and HP Cloud Service Automation 3.2 will be available individually worldwide directly from HP or through its ecosystem of worldwide channel partners.