HP acquisitions heat up utility computing race
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 6/1/2004 12:00:00 AM
Utility computing—the idea that IT resources can be managed as needed—like heat or electricity—is now a dominant theme among data center vendors.
IBM is the heaviest promoter, with its seemingly ubiquitous ads for on-demand computing. Hewlett-Packard (HP) trumpets the adaptive enterprise, while Sun Microsystems calls its utility computing initiative N1. Names aside, users interested in utility computing need to examine whether their vendor has all the tools to make it work.
The general consensus among industry analysts is that no vendor currently has the full set of tools to support the model. But there also seems to be general agreement that the recent acquisitions of two companies closed significant gaps in HP's utility computing portfolio.
One company, Novadigm, gives HP technology for automatically distributing new applications—and patches for existing applications—to servers, desktops, and mobile computers. The other company, Consera, brings technology for tracking how each device on a network is configured.
HP is expected to merge these products into its OpenView network management software suite.
"The goal of these acquisitions is to strengthen HP's offerings in automated server management," says Frank Gillett, Forrester Research, Cambridge, Mass. Even so, he points out, HP still has to map out a strategy for completely automating data centers.
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