HP's software upgrade followed news that it had officially closed its acquisition of AppIQ Inc. on Monday. Storage Essentials is HP's name for AppIQ's Storage Authority storage resource management (SRM) suite.
The integration between Storage Essentials 5.0 and HP's Systems Insight Manager software means users can now view both management applications through a single screen. AppIQ's software is relatively unusual in that it automatically discovers and registers all physical and logical storage assets and the applications associated with those assets.
Jeff Hill, a systems and storage administrator with Exempla Healthcare, which manages three hospitals in the Denver area, has been beta-testing Storage Essentials 5.0 for five weeks. Hill said that so far he likes the ability to manage his HP ProLiant servers and storage infrastructure under a single pane of glass. He also praised the reporting tools that allow his managers to use Storage Essentials for chargeback purposes.
"The AppIQ tool is a little more intuitive," he said. "It gives you a little cleaner interface and the reporting tools are more robust. That's something I'm pretty stoked about because that gives me a chance to pass information on to my management so they can make business decisions about our storage."
Frank Harbist, HP's vice president and general manager of information life cycle management and StorageWorks Software, also offered insight into HP's plans to increase heterogeneous management capabilities through the AppIQ software, which is based on open standards. HP also plans to add management tools through application programming interface (API) plug-ins to leverage the AppIQ technology in HP BladeSystem environments as well as cluster virtualization, grid management and enhanced reporting tools.
"Fifty percent of all server shipments over the next couple of years will be in blades, so our focus in terms of moving this technology forward -- allowing for automation capabilities -- will really be around blade system environments," Harbist said. "The ability to manage not just physical, discrete devices but virtualized devices is another key area where you'll see investment from us -- whether that be by virtue of storage grids or storage clusters."
On the server side, Harbist said HP will be integrating its management stack with the ability to create virtual partitions through VMware. The company also plans to add in storage virtualization or the pooling of storage assets behind a layer of abstraction.
Harbist said Systems Insight Manager's server management features can be extended by simply adding one or more HP ProLiant Essentials, HP Integrity or HP Storage Essentials plug-ins. All are designed to allow users to manage server and storage infrastructure simultaneously from the same application interface.
Blade servers are "the direction [HP is] heading in," said Hill. "Being able to see all the monitoring pieces of the blade chassis and the blade switch and then being able to see the storage on the other side gives you the entire picture in one place."