Network World - HP is kicking off its Software Universe 2010 show today in Washington, D.C., where it's unveiling a raft of new and upgraded products designed to simplify management of virtualized environments and cloud-based services.
As enterprises adopt hybrid IT models, spanning physical and virtual environments, they need tools that can help manage the performance and availability of all their applications, irrespective of where they're running, says Paul Muller, vice president of strategic marketing for software products in HP's Software & Solutions group.
"We want to help IT simplify and automate the process of deploying business applications into this new hybrid world of virtual, cloud, physical, on-premise and off-premise, and help them accelerate the benefits to the business without introducing them to more risk," Muller says.
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Among the news being announced at HP Software Universe is a new version of HP Business Service Management; a new product called Test Data Management; and three new service offerings designed to help customers maximize their software investments.
HP's Business Service Management (BSM) software correlates business services with the underlying infrastructure so IT teams can manage applications, networks and events more efficiently and stay in compliance with service-level agreements.
"Business Service Management 9.0 is all about helping our clients improve the health of their services in the hybrid services delivery model," Muller says.
New to BSM 9.0 is what HP is calling a "run-time service model," which maintains an updated view of a company's application services, whether the applications are running in an on-premise, off-premise, physical or virtual environment. This can reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot and analyze service issues when there's a potential problem. "Your diagnosis of a problem is only as good as the level of information that you have to work with," Muller says.
While traditional products use manually created configuration management database (CMDB service maps, BSM 9.0 automatically integrates with HP's Configuration Management System. The service model is constantly updated to ensure that IT operations teams can view the most accurate state of IT services. This is particularly critical for managing virtualized and cloud environments, Muller says.
"We're dealing with a virtual/cloud world where the velocity and frequency of change has, we believe, somewhere between 10 to 100 times the number of changes that were occurring in traditional physical environments. So you need a system that [keeps track of all those changes] and is run-time up to date, all the time."
New collaboration capabilities in BSM 9.0 use mash-ups to provide role-based management data, in context, to IT team members to speed decision making and problem resolution. "So you've got a contextualized but shared view of the IT world," Muller says.
New elements in the BSM 9.0 portfolio include: HP's Business Availability Center 9.0 for applications monitoring and diagnostics; Operations Manager i 9.0, which automatically discovers and reports any changes in applications and physical/virtual infrastructure; and Network Management Center 9.0, which integrates fault, availability and performance management into a single view.
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