HP Helps Users Create Flexible Infrastructures

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The provisioning and repurposing of datacenter resources to prepare for new business initiatives, testing, or quality assurance (QA) is often an inefficient process that costs time and money. For many IT organizations, management tools and technologies like virtualization hold promise for easing the burden of provisioning, but that promise goes unfulfilled in many instances.

With the refresh in January of HP Insight Dynamics – VSE v4.1 and the release of Insight Orchestration, HP took a giant step toward making the provisioning of IT resources easier for all parties involved, and it's a step that IT organizations can take right now to experience tangible savings of time and money while at the same time becoming more agile for the future.

The Business Value of HP Insight Dynamics Case Study: Businesses can improve IT efficiency with HP Insight Dynamics-VSE, which helps reduce hardware, software, and support costs, lower change costs, and raise business resilience.

Traditionally, when new IT services were needed a team would request servers and infrastructure. An architect would then explain what was available and what could be set up. Before the request was completed there were multiple handoffs, usually involving a number of Visio charts and spreadsheets. Eventually the process was completed and the work could begin.

"We would hear from our customers it could be weeks or in some cases even months," said Andy Smith, Insight Orchestration Product Manager at HP.

HP Insight Dynamics – VSE with Insight Orchestration enables the members of an IT organization to use a self-service portal to provision infrastructure in a consistent and automated manner from pools of shared resources. It covers every step of the process for creating a service from the initial request through decommissioning and includes embedded workflow and role-based permissions. These features combine to help smooth the handoffs that take place in the process.

And because time is money, automating and streamlining the provisioning process helps companies focus on other issues that can positively impact the bottom line. "Time is a huge saving, as far as what your IT staff is spending its time on," Smith said. "IT can deliver much faster for the business, and focus on value-add innovations."

HP Insight Dynamics – VSE with Insight Orchestration starts the process with a visual design tool that lets architects create service templates from an online catalog of available resources. These "best practice" configurations are then approved and published so users can easily find what is available using the self-service portal. With a click of a mouse, the selected service is automatically configured with its server, storage, and network resources after the request is approved.

HP Insight Orchestration helps streamline the approval process by sending an e-mail with the details of the request to a designated person or group and acting automatically upon receiving the response. Using the embedded workflow automation features, Insight Orchestration can optionally be linked with HP or third-party management tools, such as HP Service Manager, to integrate requests and approvals with existing change management processes.

When the service is no longer needed it is returned back into the pool of available resources, helping the datacenter run more efficiently because services are no longer under-utilized when users are done working with them.

Using "lease periods," users can check out infrastructure only when they need it for brief testing or QA purposes. IT resources don't have to be devoted full-time to tasks that use them only on occasion.

HP Insight Dynamics – VSE with Insight Orchestration doesn't just make the service provisioning process run more smoothly, it creates efficiencies in servers as well, said HP's Smith. It helps increase server utilization rates by controlling and tracking which resources are being used and making them available when they are done.

Easier sharing of resources and the ability to quickly provision services are popular goals that datacenters have been trying to accomplish for years. "Virtualization made some of these things easier," said Andy Scholl, Marketing Program Manager, HP Enterprise Storage and Server Software.

HP Insight Dynamics – VSE with Insight Orchestration covers both virtual and physical servers, so IT organizations that are employing virtual resources can take advantage of its features just the same as those who aren't currently virtualizing or those who plan to.

Insight Orchestration builds on the advanced infrastructure features of HP Insight Dynamics – VSE software. Insight Dynamics – VSE helps users analyze and optimize their virtual and physical infrastructure using a number of features.

Insight Dynamics – VSE uses a logical server approach that helps administrators plan, deploy, move, adjust, and manage server instances. Logical servers are a new class of abstracted servers that allows administrators to manage physical machines and virtual machines using the same management construct. A logical server is defined by a server profile that is easily created and moved across physical and virtual machines.

Using capacity planning capabilities, Insight Dynamics – VSE can help administrators plan datacenter capacity and power consumption. By monitoring thousands of data points and using "Smart Solver" technology, Insight Dynamics recommends optimal solutions for reducing the number of physical servers and maximizing energy efficiency.

Another optional extension of Insight Dynamics – VSE, HP Insight Recovery, provides an integrated Disaster Recovery solution. It transfers workloads running on HP BladeSystem with ProLiant server blades or in ProLiant-based VMware virtual machines to a recovery site. Using the Continuous Access capabilities with HP EVA storage environments, HP Insight Recovery ensures application data is properly transitioned to the recovery location in minutes.

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