Partners

Hewlett-Packard (HP)

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Hewlett-Packard (HP) is a world-leading information technology company that operates in more than 170 countries around the world. HP applies new thinking and ideas to create simple, valuable, and trusted experiences with technology. The company’s focus is to provide constant improvement in the way its customers live and work through technology products and services, from the individual consumer to the largest enterprise.

Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft Virtualization

The HP and Microsoft Frontline Partnership is one of the oldest of its kind in the industry with more than 20 years of combined marketplace leadership. Focusing on innovation and synchronization, technical expertise and track record, and stability-driven approach enable Microsoft and HP to deliver proven Frontline innovation for the way customers run their businesses.

HP and Microsoft have collaborated on best industry practices to help business and IT respond and adapt to change. Microsoft and HP provide integrated hardware and software virtualization and management technology products built to help your business become an agile, adaptive enterprise.

A virtualization solution from Microsoft and HP offers multiple complementary virtualization technologies that address all aspects of your virtualized environment. The inherent compatibility of solutions from Microsoft and HP enables customers to deploy virtualization technologies from the desktop to the data center quickly, easily, and with a high degree of confidence. Together, Microsoft and HP provide the complete infrastructure of operating system and management software, HP ProLiant and BladeSystem servers, and HP StorageWorks storage to help you address the key issues associated with your virtualization initiative for a dynamic IT environment.

  • Integrated Virtualization, Management Solution: Complementary hardware/software for any virtualization scenario; compatible tools unify management of virtual machines and energy-efficient ProLiant and BladeSystem servers; functionality from deployment, monitoring, and control of hardware infrastructure, through to operating system and application management.

  • Business Benefits Realized Quickly: Virtualization solutions plug into existing infrastructure; integrated server assessment, solution accelerator tools reduce time to solution; virtualization technologies within familiar server roles shorten learning curve.

  • Amplified Benefits Through Trusted Partnership: HP and Microsoft jointly test and optimize their virtualization technologies; more than 3,600 Microsoft-certified experts and 22,000 HP professionals are trained on Microsoft technologies.

Customer Scenario

Organizations consolidate servers to reduce hardware costs, decrease electrical consumption and server administration expenses, and increase efficiency in the development environment. Conversely, creating more and more virtual machines introduces new challenges associated with managing an increasingly abstract environment. This situation is exacerbated as organizations progress with presentation and application virtualization implementations intended to drive agility and business continuity across the enterprise. Creating virtualization solutions from the data center to the desktop multiplies the business benefits of virtualization, but it is crucial to curtail the sprawl of virtual machines—or run the risk of diluting the value of virtualization investments. Virtualization brings new challenges, and customers need to be able to quickly and reliably configure, deploy, and update their servers, while proactively monitoring server health and controlling power usage, as well as remotely control their servers in any location. Customers increasingly need to simplify their data center deployments and combine disaster recovery, capacity planning, and automated provisioning to unite their physical and virtual worlds.

HP + Microsoft Solution

Virtualization is a key element of every company’s IT infrastructure. Taking an IT-centric approach to virtualization – addressing only discrete projects and business services -- can limit benefits. HP helps companies take a comprehensive approach to virtualization to deliver applications and business services more quickly, put unused data center capacity to work on business priorities, and enhance availability, continuity, and security.

HP ProLiant and HP BladeSystem servers and StorageWorks storage – part of the industry’s most complete platform designed for virtualization – broadly support Microsoft virtualization technologies, including Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server.

Managing physical and virtual environments had forced customers to compromise – too many tools and not enough deep integration between them. HP Insight Control suite for Microsoft System Center (ICE-SC) is the first extensive solution that provides seamless integration of the unique ProLiant and BladeSystem manageability features into the Microsoft System Center consoles. Backed by HP service and support, ICE-SC delivers a powerful hardware management experience for customers who have standardized on a Microsoft System Center management platform.

  • Maximize server uptime & significantly reduce time to resolution when problems arise

  • Proactively manage virtual machine workloads based on pre-failure conditions in underlying host systems

  • Optimize administrator time spent on common maintenance tasks

  • Automate deployment and updating of ProLiant and BladeSystem servers

ICE for System Center allows you to:

  • Quickly and reliably configure, deploy and update ProLiant servers through Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager.

  • Proactively monitor the health of physical and virtual servers and intelligently respond to hardware events using System Center Operations Manager and System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

  • Remotely control HP servers in any location directly from the System Center Operations Manager console using HP iLO Advanced.

  • Safely cap power usage to fit more servers within existing power envelopes – up to triple the capacity – without putting electrical infrastructure at risk with HP Dynamic Power Capping.

HP provides innovative and useful technology to speed the return on your virtualization investment. The BladeSystem Matrix is a cloud infrastructure in a box that brings the economics, scalability and response times of the cloud to diverse applications across your data center. Uniquely, it combines disaster recovery, capacity planning, and automated provisioning with a self-service portal into one command center to unite your physical and virtual worlds. With Matrix, you get a wire-once infrastructure that converges network, storage and compute to help you accelerate complex IT projects, simplify daily tasks and continuously lower costs across your data center. The most fully integrated, adaptive infrastructure environment that HP has ever created, Matrix brings together the best of HP and our partner data center know-how into one environment.

BladeSystem Matrix is all about enhancement and integration with what you have today; your networks, your SANs, plus it’s transparent to your preferred applications, OSes and hypervisors (including Hyper-V). It also supports your processes and teams’ roles, so Matrix works the same way your team prefers to get work done, only faster. Our goal is to help you use more of the resources you already have, accelerate your toughest projects, and make your team more productive so they can focus on what they do best.

Microsoft and HP provide complementary software and hardware with integrated management tools that optimize the value of virtualization investments and let you squeeze maximum productivity and efficiency from your virtual environment.

The new ProLiant G6 servers are designed for virtualization. More memory, processing and I/O means more Virtual Machines (VM) per server than ever before, resulting in lower acquisition costs per VM and optimum resource utilization in your data center.

  • HP Insight software, including Insight Control suite and Insight Dynamics – VSE, deliver comprehensive system health, remote control, vulnerability scanning, and patch management, as well as flexible deployment, virtual machine management, and power management in one, easy-to-install package.

  • HP virtualization technology and expertise help optimize resources from the desktop to the data center.

  • New ProLiant G6 servers are designed for virtualization. More memory, processing and I/O means more Virtual Machines (VM) per server than ever before, resulting in lower acquisition costs per VM and optimum resource utilization in your data center.

  • HP BladeSystem c-Class provides an energy-efficient and space-saving design, along with innovative management tools and Virtual Connect technology, making it the perfect virtualization platform.

Solution Briefs

White Papers

Best Practice Guides

Reference Architectures

Scalability Briefs

Webcasts

Videos

Press Releases

  • MLS Property Information Network, Inc.
    “In the long term, the HP solution will reduce our annual total cost of ownership for our two data centers by 30 percent easily. That puts our payback at well under two years. We’ve taken a lot of the limits off of traditional IT. We can build and destroy virtual servers at will. And when you consider the easier learning curve and the benefits of having a single point of contact and a uniform way of getting support with HP, it’s pretty compelling.”

Case studies

Professional Services

  • HP Data Center Transformation Services
    HP Data Center Transformation services can assist with virtualization strategy, design, transition, acceleration, infrastructure services, virtual desktop infrastructure, and support and education.

  • HP Software Technology Services for Hyper-V
    HP delivers a portfolio of expert services to streamline deployment and installation of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V software and provides help on how to manage it.

KB Articles

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