HP Orchestrates Datacenters With OpenStack, Chef
An "orchestrated datacenter" rolled out by Hewlett-Packard aims to accelerate the design and deployment of applications, infrastructure and cloud-based services, the company said.
The adoption of cloud computing and mobility is accelerating the life cycle of applications while forcing network administrators to focus more closely on enterprise users in the design and delivery of applications. That requires greater use of datacenter automation and orchestration software.
HP said its Orchestrated Datacenter is designed to coordinate the datacenter stack, including physical and virtual servers, networks, storage, databases and middleware along with the application layer. It also is said to automate the IT workflows across service desks, monitoring and security operations.
The company claims it new datacenter tool can help IT teams design, customize and deploy services securely in test and production as well as across traditional, private and public clouds.
Market researchers say datacenter automation and orchestrating network infrastructure, middleware as well as application provisioning and network configuring is one way to reduce IT costs while making businesses more agile.
Hence, HP is touting its Orchestrated Datacenter as addressing these priorities by combining open source technologies such as OpenStack and the Chef configuration management tool with the company's stack automation technologies and operational best practices. The company added that the roll out of its Orchestrated Datacenter extends its commitment to OpenStack technology and hybrid IT delivery.
In one user case provided by HP, customer Air France said it used Orchestrated Datacenter to automate the installation process for server clusters and virtual machines. Server cluster installation time was reduced from six days down to one while virtual machine installation was reduced from more than 24 hours to less than 15 minutes, HP claimed.
Along with the datacenter manager, the company also announced HP Enterprise Maps and other cloud service and server automation tools designed to manage virtual machine deployments and improve application development and deployment.
HP Enterprise Maps is described as adhering to the ArchiMate 2 enterprise architecture standard. It is being augmented by a new version of the HP Cloud Service Automation tool along with HP Operations Orchestration and Server Automation software.
The company claimed the package would ease virtual machine deployments in OpenStack and public cloud environments, including operating system provisioning and software deployment and compliance management.
Other benefits include creation of roadmaps of services and applications to be migrated to private and public clouds along with rapid deployment, debugging and management of application Chef recipes and cookbooks without relying on the full Chef infrastructure.
HP said its new Enterprise Maps, Cloud Service Automation, Server Automation and Operations Orchestration packages would be available from the company and its global channel partners in June. The HP Operations Orchestration Community Edition is available now for download.
The company also said it expects to offer updated versions of its HP Cloud Service Automation but did not specify when.
