HP extends IT management tools to clouds

Beverley Head
Thursday, 17 December 2009 04:57

IT Industry - Market

Tapping into the growing enterprise interest in cloud computing, HP has extended three of its IT management tools to allow them to be used by CIOs who are using, or planning a move to, third party cloud based computing services.

The company claims that the current economic climate has most enterprise CIOs keen to develop flexible and scalable information technology infrastructures that can be grown or reduced according to changing business needs. This is prompting increased interest in cloud based services, especially in a “recovering economy” according to Peter Lilley HP’s marketing manager for software and solutions.

HP’s range of cloud tools which it announced in Australia this morning are intended to extend some of the IT management capabilities it has developed for in-house use so they can now be applied as organisations migrate applications and data to third party clouds.

The first tool which has been extended to the cloud is Operations Orchestration, which essentially allows IT managers to create a series of business rules that automate IT provisioning. So, when the load on the servers reaches a pre-determined threshold, more cloud based servers will be provisioned automatically.

Correspondingly if business demand falls off, servers in the cloud can be de-provisioned.

This facility has been available for in house provisioning for some time, but is now available for third party cloud services.  Lilley claims that the tool provides better governance and control of cloud provisioning.

US news reports note that entry level pricing for the tool starts at $US125,000 clearly positioning it as an enterprise-only class solution.

HP has also introduced what it calls Cloud Assure. A similar tool targeted at internal cloud applications was released in March offering simulated testing, real time performance monitoring and security testing of applications. Lilley said this was now being extended so that applications which were run in third party clouds could also be tested and monitored.

The final tool is HP Communications as a Service which is targeted at telecommunications companies and service providers which want to offer cloud computing services to third parties.

HP claimed that the three tools would deliver improved “elasticity”, cost control and risk mitigation by allowing enterprises to quickly and efficiently respond to changing business needs by provisioning cloud based or in house computing services as required.

Acknowledging that Australian enterprises lagged behind the fastest international adopters of cloud computing, Lilley said that there was nevertheless a growing interest in cloud services in Australia, nominating both public service and financial services companies as being among the most enthusiastic.