HP Revamps Cloud Management and Automation Software Slate

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Hewlett Packard (HP) has updated its data center IT management portfolio to help businesses keep up with the demands of today’s mobility-enhanced, social-networked workforces.

Arguing that non-automated processes are hindering data center agility and innovation — two desirable traits in today’s hyper-competitive business climate — HP is hoping to wean administrators off well-worn scripts and repetitive manual tasks. The Palo Alto-based IT systems and services provider has launched “a comprehensive, integrated portfolio of software and services that helps to automate the complete life cycle of IT services — from routine data center maintenance to the delivery of business processes,” according to a statement.

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That portfolio, which is available now, includes HP Server Automation 10, Operations Orchestration 10, Database and Middleware Automation 10 and Cloud Service Automation 3.2.

In a blog post, Manoj Raisinghani, senior director of HP Software Product Marketing, noted that mobile, social, Big Data and cloud services are “having a profound impact on enterprise IT, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that manual processes like provisioning and managing services using scripts will simply not cut it in the face of increasing business demands and requirements for scale.”

The answer is massively automated data center management and HP is setting out to provide a software platform that makes it possible.

For instance, the company boasts that Operations Orchestration 10 slashes the time it takes to build and deploy business processes from weeks to minutes, whether on-premises or cloud-based. The product automates all application and infrastructure runbooks and includes support for more than 5,000 IT operations. New to this edition is support for Amazon S3 Storage, HP ArcSight, HP Fortify, OpenStack and SAP.

HP Server Automation 10 helps IT shops tame virtual machine sprawl with the ability to manage over 100,000 physical and virtual servers from a single management console. According to the company, the software’s server lifecycle automation capabilities improve “operational economics by reducing the administrator-to-server ratio by up to 60 percent.” Small IT shops can start managing their servers in as little as an hour with a virtual appliance-based option called HP Server Automation Standard.

HP Database and Middleware Automation 10 ships with over 1,000 best practices to manage database and middleware servers, improving administrator efficiency by up to 70 percent, claims HP. It also offers built-in compliance reports, allowing regulated organizations to stay on the right side of the law when it comes to managing their data.

Finally, HP Cloud Service Automation 3.2 integrates with the aforementioned products — particularly Operations Orchestration 10 and Server Automation 10 — to extend centralized and automated IT management to the cloud. The software supports Amazon EC2, HP Cloud Services, KVM OpenStack and Microsoft Hyper-V.

When paired with HP Database and Middleware Automation, Cloud Service Automation “offers self-service portals for Database-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service environments that deliver end-to-end IT application services,” according to HP.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Small Business Computing and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.