HP invokes Adaptive Enterprise mantra

Hewlett-Packard will detail enhancements to its virtualization products, the HP-UX 11i Unix operating system, and its AlphaServers this week during its HP World 2004 conference in Chicago.

The announcements fall under HP’s Adaptive Enterprise mantra. “It’s all part of our Adaptive Enterprise to help customers be able to change, and how we can facilitate that,” said Nick van der Zweep, HP’s director of virtualization and utility computing.

Enhancements to the virtualization technology, for instance, go toward enabling change, van der Zweep said. At the show, HP will announce that it is making VSE (Virtual Server Environment) available on multiple operating systems, beginning with Linux and, down the road, including Windows, he said.

Scott Wolfe, enterprise IT architect at Boeing Employees Credit Union, said his next project will be a server consolidation and virtualization initiative. “Virtualization gives you the flexibility if you’re not sure what your needs are and those needs change regularly,” he said.

HP enhanced the Global Workload Manager capability within VSE with ease-of-use improvements and increased scaling. The software can now scale to hundreds of machines and servers, and HP Integrity Virtual Machine allows customers to create sub-CPU virtual machines that share I/O, van der Zweep said. “You can have a virtual machine inside an environment, and if it’s not doing anything, it’s not wasting an entire CPU,” he explained. HP’s Integrity Virtual Machine will ship next year, but the company will demonstrate it at the show.

Jonathan Eunice, principal analyst at Illuminata, said HP’s VSE is a strong product that has not been pushed as hard as other companies have pushed their products. “When compared head-to-head with other products, it’s a very strong contender,” he said.

The company also boosted clustering support by enabling clusters to mix PA-RISC and Integrity server environments, easing migration to Integrity.

In addition, the company upgraded its Unix operating system, HP-UX 11i, which includes virtual partitioning and the enhanced Global Workload Manager. HP also increased the large file system to 32TB and enabled the OS to support 128-way processing. Other improvements include easier system administration, better performance, and increased scalability.

HP will also introduce the StorageWorks EVA3000, a 2GB Fibre Channel SAN array and software bundle.

On the hardware front, HP plans to announce previously promised improvements to the AlphaServer lineup, namely a performance increase of as much as 16 percent that results from a 1.3GHz chip in the GS1280 server and a 1.15GHz chip in the ES47/80 servers.