HP recently unveiled HP OneView, an industry-first, consumer-inspired infrastructure management platform for HP Converged Infrastructure that simplifies the most basic steps that underlay all data centre processes – allowing IT teams to dramatically improve operations while reducing costs and manual errors that cause downtime.
The proliferation of as-a-service technology, an influx of tech-savvy workers and an increase in business complexity is widening the gap between business demand and traditional IT supply. Organisations are now struggling to deliver and manage IT using outdated management tools that were designed for a past era.
Designed for the HP BladeSystem, HP ProLiant Generation 8 (Gen8) and HP ProLiant Generation 7 servers, HP OneView is built with the best-in-class server and software technology that offers a single management platform to foster collaboration and communication with IT across the data centre.
HP OneView improves the productivity for IT administrators with an intuitive user interface and automated intelligence that simplifies common tasks. The most common data centre processes, such as deployment, updating, migrating and troubleshooting are reduced from hours or days to minutes.
For example, provisioning hypervisors across 16 servers with traditional tools requires two hours and 50 minutes of administrative time, compared to just 14 minutes with HP OneView. The process of retiring a virtual local area network (vLAN) requires only four steps and 30 seconds of administrative time with HP OneView, compared to 480 steps and more than two hours with a traditional tool.
“Social media, the consumerisation of IT and changing demographics are altering how work gets done, forcing organisations to address a widening gap between enterprise demands and traditional IT supply,” says Andrew McNiven, Industry Standard Servers category manager, HP South Africa.
“The current infrastructure management model is stuck in the past and HP OneView is the first step in fundamentally rethinking the entire approach to infrastructure management in the data centre.”
To develop HP OneView, HP collaborated with more than 150 leading customers across 30 real-world data centres worldwide over four years to understand the drivers of cost, inefficiencies and delays around the most common infrastructure management tasks, processes and steps.
HP also examined everyday modern consumer applications that are purpose-built to perform specific tasks with simplicity and speed, and then applied those lessons to the complexity and scale of the data centre.
HP OneView delivers unprecedented ease of use so organisations can deploy and manage HP infrastructure faster, with a 42% lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and a 220% return on investment (ROI).
Additional benefits include:
* Workloads can be migrated up to five times faster than with manual operations;
* The administration time to configure servers is nine times faster compared to manual operations; and
* Network configurations are an estimated 24 times faster as compared to manual operations.
“Resource-strapped organisations today are looking for infrastructure management platforms that will unchain them from spending countless hours on mundane, administrative tasks to focus more on innovation,” says Matt Eastwood, group VP and GM, IDC.
“The market is primed and ready for an infrastructure management platform that is more intuitive and built for the needs of IT today – not the days gone by.”
Consumer-inspired features of HP OneView include:
* Dashboard – allows users to view the entire data centre in seconds. The view is equally simple whether a customer has 16 devices or 640, and more information is just one click away. With many traditional management tools of today, it can take more than 30 clicks to access the same information.
* Smart Search – allows administrators to find key information in seconds vs. hunting through online and offline records. Smart Search is built into every task to provide immediate access to the event device, or task information.
* MapView – examines the relationship between devices, connections and status to help administrators find, triage and fix problems in seconds or minutes.
* Templates – allows for collaboration by teams within an organisation to capture best IT practices to deploy with speed and accuracy in the future.
* Activity Feed – provides teams an effective way to communicate as well as a place that combines tasks, hardware alerts and administrative notes into a single view.
“Existing IT infrastructure management tools are designed for individual devices, but don’t scale well in large data centres and are not optimised for the user. As a result it’s hard for United Airlines to scale IT services without corresponding increases in time and headcount,” says Marian Lakov, enterprise architect, Technology Architecture, United Airlines.
“HP OneView creates a new direction by providing a universal infrastructure management platform that is flexible enough to scale from a single enclosure to large data centres and is optimised for infrastructure teams. Our initial findings have been very promising and we believe that going forward, OneView will allow the United IT team to configure and manage the IT infrastructure in a more efficient way.”
HP Technology Services ensures seamless transition from current HP infrastructure management tools such as HP Insight Control and HP Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager to HP OneView. By simplifying the implementation of HP OneView, HP improves productivity and operational efficiency.
Each HP OneView license includes three years of software and technical support updates. In addition, customers can choose to extend support by purchasing HP Care Packs, which provide services coverage for four or five years to match anticipated hardware usage.
Additional services include:
* HP OneView Startup Service – reduces implementation time and ensures HP OneView is properly integrated into the customer’s environment with basic installation and configuration of all components.
* Proactive Care for OneView – combines comprehensive, proactive support for hardware and software with end-to-end reactive call support from HP technical experts.
* HP OneView Integration Service – ensures customers have a plan for pre-existing data by offering eight hours of data migration assistance in addition to basic HP OneView installation and configuration.
* HP Education Services – a hands-on course that provides customers the tools they need to effectively use and manage HP OneView.
