HPs Darwin Evolves

At a press conference in San Jose, Calif., on Tuesday—which marked the one-year anniversary of HPs merger with Compaq—Hewlett-Packard unveiled its Adaptive Enterprise strategy and announced new services under the Darwin Reference Architecture.

Although aspects of HPs strategy are similar to efforts announced last year by IBM and Sun, its noteworthy because it embraces open source and standard-based technology. And having more major vendors supporting standards sounds like good news for IT managers.

The Darwin Reference Architecture is a standards-based framework that helps enterprises adapt a more agile, flexible business environment—where, for example, IT managers can manage resources in virtualized pools and dynamically allocate and scale resources to meet business demands.

Standing out among HPs new service announcements was the Agility Assessment Service, for helping IT managers assess the relationship between their business processes and the underlying infrastructure in a dynamic, flexible manner.

Software enhancements in HP OpenView include HP-UX Workload Manager 2.1, a new goal-based policy engine for delivering virtual HP-UX servers that can dynamically grow to meet application demands.

HPs new Self-Healing Services for OpenView will enable the embedded engine as well as integrated services to detect problems, perform self analysis and proactively recommend solutions.

HP is showcasing its UDC (Utility Data Center), announced last year, with installations in California and the United Kingdom that are linked via grid technologies. The software component provides utility-based computing where every data center resource (servers, networking, storage and applications) can be virtualized and dynamically allocated to meet the needs of a changing environment.

HPs Tuesday pitch, although it trails similar strategic announcements from Sun and IBM, is good news for IT managers. After all, its good to see major vendors supporting open architectures and solutions that allow companies to dynamically manage and change their infrastructures on demand.

Of course, well have to see how HPs plans evolve as the company rolls out enhancements to validate its strategy in the next 12 months.

How does your companys infrastructure adapt to business changes? Let me know at francis_chu@ziffdavis.com.