HP Creates Unified Software Unit For Servers and Storage

Published: January 25, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Hewlett-Packard announced this week that it has brought together the disparate systems management, virtualization, and automation software features of its various server and storage array products into a new group that will work together to create a more unified product line that spans all of HP's enterprise products.

Bob Schultz has been named senior vice president and general manager of the Server and Storage Software unit, and he reports directly to Scott Stallard, general manager of the Enterprise Storage and Server group. The new software unit does not have control of the operating systems that run on HP's Integrity platforms--HP-UX, OpenVMS, or NonStop. Those operating systems remain with their hardware units within the Business Critical Systems unit. But the Server and Storage Software unit does include auxiliary software that works on both ProLiant and Integrity systems and StorageWorks storage arrays.

Specifically, Schultz now takes control of the ProLiant Essentials system provisioning software for HP's X64 server products as well as the System Insight Manager management software, which runs on both ProLiant and Integrity systems. The Virtual Server Environment from within HP-UX, which provides server virtualization and will eventually provide dynamic, policy-based provisioning and virtualization for HP-UX running on Integrity machines, is also part of the new software unit. The Storage Essentials software for HP's disk arrays is also being brought in.

The goal, according to Schultz, is to provide a consistent set of management, virtualization, and automation tools across all these products, which have different engineering teams and different research and development budgets. "Eventually, we want these pieces to become a unified set," Schultz says. "For instance, VSE has a lot of capabilities and extending it beyond HP-UX is something we are examining."

He stopped short of promising a unified virtualization environment that runs on ProLiant and Integrity machines and includes support for HP-UX, Windows, and Linux all on these boxes. But this is the obvious goal. From a systems management perspective, there should be no difference in how boxes are virtualized and provisioned.

HP's storage replication software will stay in the StorageWorks group and is not part of the new Server and Storage Software unit.

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