When IT systems become critical

ICT Solutions, in collaboration with HP, have organised a seminar on so-called business-critical infrastructure. Speakers from HP showed how a business organisation can have a robust infrastructure made up of servers, storage and networking, that runs all the time and does not fail, when such failure means substantial loss of business.

"Uptime is the basic measurement here. Most business cannot afford to have their IT systems down even for a few minutes," explained Bea Mueller-Meszarich, manager for enterprise storage, server and networking at HP CDG (southeast Europe, including Malta) said.

Ken Surplice, product manager for business critical systems at HP EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) emphasised the company's new approach to the new needs of businesses.

"In a small system or a big system it's no longer just a matter of performance. The difference now is not about the scale but how risk has evolved and become business critical. You can't afford to fail. Our philosophy is to build systems that stay up come what may. What's new is that we can now build such business critical IT layered on top of standard components, making it much more affordable," he said.

"In the past, IT costs were huge but now they are more affordable. HP has changed the game with a new approach: make things more integrated and cheaper to buy and maintain."

A few weeks ago, HP announced its new Integrity solutions that significantly improve customers' service-level agreement performance, provide up to 100 percent application availability and simplify mission-critical computing for the most demanding application workloads. Built on a new HP Blade Scale Architecture that spans servers, storage and networking, the Integrity solutions deliver the industry's first mission-critical Converged Infrastructure. Even the flagship integrity superdome has undergone a major architectural change, the first in a decade, bringing new economies, HP said.

The architecture allows clients to deploy, automate and manage a complete range of applications side by side, within the same enclosure, and using the same components, tools and processes. With a single management environment, clients can maintain consistent control of the entire IT infrastructure. This was demonstrated during the seminar.

According to HP, its new Integrity portfolio includes servers, software and services that provide clients with up to 450 per cent improvement in infrastructure reliability over previous generations and ensures higher levels of availability with HP Mission Critical Services that identify all possible sources of downtime.

The company also introduced AllianceONE, a partner program that optimises solutions across servers, storage, networking and professional services that support a mission-critical converged infrastructure. HP converged infrastructure provides a blueprint for clients that want to eliminate sprawl, complexity and excess maintenance costs.

Michel Portelli, business-critical systems channel sales manager for HP EMEA, reflected on the effects of the economic downturn on business organisations and the recent technological developments.

"The message today has changed. It is more business-oriented. We explain to chief information officers about how much money they can save. We talk about the converged infrastructures and the benefits this offers to large and small companies. Indeed we have made such systems affordable to SMEs. Feedback across the board has been positive. People are willing to listen about this," said Mr Portelli, a Maltese who has been working with HP in Europe for several years.

www.hp.com/go/integrity.

www.hp.com/go/covergedinfrastructure