HP shows Middle East enterprises how to reduce costs and increase efficiency

Attended by enterprise customers from around the region, the event showcased new HP solutions and services - the latest additions to the industry's most complete portfolio of virtualisation offerings - which help business customers optimise their data centres by pooling and sharing IT resources.

"We have identified virtualisation as a key issue for enterprises around the Middle East," said Martyn Molnar, Director of Enterprise Business Systems with HP Middle East.

"HP has recently introduced new software and services to help our customers reduce costs, increase agility and simplify management of virtual IT. With this roadshow, we are demonstrating the real business value that virtualisation offers and we expect more and more regional companies to adopt this technology over the coming months."

Recent additions to HP's range of virtualisation portfolio include the expansion of the multi-operating system HP Virtual Server Environment for HP Integrity servers, new HP-UX 11i mission-critical virtualisation capabilities, accelerated availability of OpenVMS on virtualised Integrity servers, a new packaged solution with VMware and HP ProLiant Essentials Virtualisation Management software, and new network consolidation service.

HP has also recently introduced new HP Integrity Essentials software products, offering customers the industry's first and most robust integrated software family for planning, managing and automating virtual servers.

The new software is part of the HP Virtual Server Environment for HP Integrity and HP 9000 servers. The offerings enable enterprises to achieve a greater return on their IT investments by optimising server resource utilisation in real time based on business priorities. From a single console, IT administrators can now:

• Plan and simulate the placement of application workloads with the industry's first intuitive, integrated tool for capacity planning - the new HP Integrity Essentials Capacity Advisor;

• Configure and manage all types of virtual and physical server resources from a single management console with the industry's first comprehensive, easy-to-use virtualisation management software - the new HP Integrity Essentials Virtualisation Manager;

• Automate the allocation of server resources to applications based on business priorities. Already available for HP-UX 11i and Linux, HP Integrity Essentials Global Workload Manager is now extended to support OpenVMS on HP Integrity servers.

"HP is committed to drive the adoption of virtualisation in the Middle East as a way for our customers to maximise IT spend and resources," explained Molnar.

The roadshow was attended by over 150 HP customers spanning the region and featured a full day of industry reviews, expert speakers and product demonstrations.