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CHICAGO—Hewlett-Packard Co. Monday at the HP Software Forum brought its Adaptive Management vision into sharper focus and filled in pieces of that vision with new and enhanced offerings.
According to HPs vision, IT infrastructure has to be adaptable for any business event to be an enabler for change. That means greater automation and virtualization, said Nora Denzel, senior vice president and general manager of HPs Global Software Business Unit in her keynote Monday.
“Adaptive is about IT business management—managing end-to-end services. The ultimate state of IT fitness is when supply and demand match, so that every business process triggers an automated IT response,” she said.
Getting there requires evolutionary changes that involve people, technology and processes. “You have to train people, make process changes and invest in new technology. Without those, you cant have an adaptive enterprise,” Denzel said.
The first phase in that evolution—one that a majority of HP customers have made—is to create a stable business environment. The second phase, business efficiency, is about IT services management as well as integrated and clustered resources. Denzel estimated that 30 percent of HP customers are there. The third phase, real-time business agility, involves consolidated servers and storage, business processes linked to IT environments, standard interfaces that link different infrastructure elements, and the virtualization and federation of all resources.
OpenView users at the Commonwealth of Massachusetts fit into the business stability phase, where “operational stability” is preached, according to Richard Glasberg, director of data communications in Boston.
“A lot of building blocks still have to be put in place to see [HPs vision] through. Its been a long time coming,” he said of the Adaptive Management strategy.
Still, Denzel said, HP today offers products for each phase.
New offerings that address the business stability phase include OpenView Network Node Manager Advanced 7.0. It adds more intelligence in its diagnostic engine to enhance root cause analysis and reduce mean time to repair by gathering additional data on a problem from syslog data files. The new option, which will be sold alongside a Network Node Manager Standard version, also provides Layer 2 problem diagnostics.
Network Node Manager Advanced 7.0, due by the end of September, is expected to start at about $10,000, a $5,000 premium over the Standard version.
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Also in the business stability phase is OpenView Operations for Windows Release 7.2, which allows users to manage performance, availability and services associated with Windows 2003 Server, including Active Directory. It is also due by late September.
HP addressed the business efficiency phase of Adaptive Management with Service Navigator Value Pack Release 7.1, which adds a new graphical interface that allows users to quickly establish relationships between services and the infrastructure that supports them. The aim is to simplify the deployment and use of service management over existing scripting techniques. Once service views are created, they can be stored in a configuration database shared by OpenView Service Desk to help speed problem diagnosis.
Such integration between Service Navigator and Service Desk allows users to correlate infrastructure and services data with service-level agreement information. The value pack is due by late October.
In addressing the business agility phase, HP previewed new technology in development, dubbed HP OpenView Business Impact Analysis, which allows users to determine the business impact of infrastructure failures or performance dips. The technology correlates business flows with operations data to help determine the financial costs and extent of business disruption.
HP also provided a preview of more robust Web services management it is adding to its OpenView Web Services Management Engine, which is due late this fall. The engine, which implements HPs Web Services Management Framework specification, is better able to discover resources and learn their attributes, is more extensible, and provides a common way to interface with other applications, according to Al Smith, chief technology officer for the fledgling OpenView Web Services Management Organization.
That group is actively pursuing standards creation based on its specification with OASIS, and it is actively engaging third-party support from vendors such as Tibco.
In addressing a lack of consolidated reporting, OpenView Solutions Marketing Manager Bill Emmett previewed new reporting developments in the works. HP will release “an aggressive stream” of report packs that combine data from other OpenView products throughout this year, he said. Emmett foreshadowed a move to a common data repository and object models based on OpenView Service Desk.
Whether users are willing to wait for such consolidation depends on the user. “Will I wait for HP to do something? Thats not me. We built interim steps for ourselves,” said Glasberg, who is using the OpenView Performance Insight reporting tool.
Also on tap at the HP Software Forum: ·
- 22 new or expanded partnerships with third-party vendors; ·
- new management for Cisco IP telephony environments; ·
- integration between CiscoWorks and Network Node Manager Advanced 7.0; and ·
- a new communications program for HP software users.