HP Envisions Smaller, Cheaper, Greener Data CenterHP Envisions Smaller, Cheaper, Greener Data Center

Hewlett-Packard has announced new servers and virtualization software aimed at enabling customers to combine underused data centers into scalable virtualized facilities, saving money and energy.HP's new ProLiant DL785 G5 server, scheduled to ship in May and costing $17,000, is designed to consolidate multiple tasks onto a small number of physical boxes. The server will work with virtualization software from VMWare, Oracle, and Microsoft. According to HP, the new server is more energy-efficient that blade servers: "This is a server that is designed to be used in consolidated and virtualized environments where customers need to scale up applications -- and when a blade infrastructure can't help," says John Bennett, worldwide director of Data Center Transformation Solutions at HP.

For managing virtualized and physical resources, HP will promote its HP Insight Dynamics-VSE software. HP Insight Dynamics-VSE supports hypervisor technology from multiple vendors and enables IT managers to plan and allocate workloads from a central console. The software learns the patterns of workloads over time and can help improve efficiencies enough to reduce the costs of common data center tasks by as much as 40 percent. It should be available in the second quarter.

HP is also offering a hosted service to move some tasks off the in-house servers. The company's Adaptive Infrastructure as a Service (AIaaS) provides services such as SAP and Microsoft Exchange running from offsite data centers managed by HP.The Register, InfoWorld, ZDNet