By William Fellows
Hewlett-Packard Co is the latest company to put some marketing muscle behind services it can offer to help customers consolidate hairballs of disparate systems. Like IBM Corp and Sun Microsystems Inc before it – and at least HP is only just behind them in this instance – it is packaging hardware, software, storage, services and pulling together new analysis and financing mechanisms in a bid to win a share of a systems consolidation market it estimates to be worth $1.5bn to $2bn.
HP, which is approaching consolidation through the IT Solutions practice in its consulting group, complains that what IBM calls its server consolidation practice is too narrow a definition of what users want to do. We can’t apply a cookie cutter to this business, HP affirms. Moreover, it claims that what users may perceive as a requirement to consolidate servers and applications can often turn out to be an enterprise management problem rather than a system replacement task. The company claims that the problem users are trying to address has as much to do with being stuck with legacy AS/400s and mainframes as it has to do with trying to manage or integrate applications running on multiple flavors of Unix; the latter being the key driver of consolidation, according to IBM. It’s about saving a bunch of money and making systems more available, and moving to fewer higher volume platforms that attract ISVs, HP argues. It aims to have users come out the other side of consolidation with an IT infrastructure which achieves 80% utilization, up from a claimed 20% or less now. It also aims to reduce staff costs by making five times as many images or ways of looking at system behavior available to administrators by 2001.
What all three are agreed upon however, is that consolidation is not primarily concerned with swapping out lots of tiny servers for behemoths. Although Sun would love to sell StarFires as mainframe replacements, it preaches co-existence: install Sun systems alongside essential host systems. HP denies IBM’s claim that users are seeking new metrics to measure overall system performance and availability to assess the success of consolidation efforts. It says total cost of ownership and feasibility analysis is sufficient given no one consolidation job is the same as another. It says it will won’t charge for a systems consolidation TCO study if it cannot find a potential overall cost saving of more than 10%.
HP’s consolidation gambit is HyperPlex, a data center-class HP 9000 cluster solution which combines HyperFabric64 (HyperFabric being the name of the V 2500 server backplane although in this context it refers to any HP 9000 server except the low-end A- Class); plus HP’s new ServiceControl systems management console for managing multiple HP-UX systems; its existing process resource manager, event monitoring, MC/ServiceGuard high availability middleware, ClusterView Plus monitoring, and Ignite/UX software configuration and deployment tools. HP notes its process resource manager can now manage disk and I/O resources in addition to CPU and memory. Sun, it claims, can only offer CPU and memory workload management in its recently introduced systems resource manager. HP says ServiceControl can integrate with OpenView and other third party systems management suites and starts at $7,800. HyperPlex starts at $234,000.
