The complete virtualization, unification and management of storage, networking and compute resources is a concept that has found many takers. Cisco calls it Unified Computing System (UCS), while HP calls it Converged Infrastructure. In addition, the industry also has other players such as Zenith Infotech and Liquid Computing who have launched their own initiatives.

While many call this the datacenter of the future, the current adoption of this concept shows that this concept is slowly but surely taking roots. The reason is simple – converging server, storage and network equipment mean significant savings on hardware, maintenance and management.

And if you look at HP’s wins in the past one year in the area of Converged Infrastructure, it does show that the concept is finding adoption. HP is using its Superdome platform as a central piece of its Converged Infrastructure strategy.

“India is a big Superdome market. Unlike other regions, Unix is not facing a lack of growth in India,” reveals Anant Sharma, Server Marketing Manager, Business Critical Systems, HP (APJ). Sharma says that the number of customers that HP has acquired on Unix is greater than anywhere in the Asia Pacific region.

Using the Converged Infrastructure strategy, HP has already signed up a list of big clients. A case in point is Britannia. The leader in biscuits used a Superdome 2 platform to consolidate multiple SAP components running on heterogeneous server platforms. The Essar group is another example. The Essar group is using HP’s Converged Infrastructure solution to build a shared services environment for selected applications across its group companies. Using the solution from HP, Essar is enabling a shared services model by pooling together all its IT resources into a virtualized environment.

Similarly, Sify has used HP’s Converged Infrastructure solution to provide demand based computing services on a pay per use or flexible contract model. Using HP’s solution, Sify has launched cloud services for select applications under its on-demand hosting platform. To enable this, Sify is using the Blade System Matrix – a product of HP’s Converged Infrastructure that will pool together Sify’s diverse IT resources into a highly automated and virtualized resource pool. Specific application templates have been developed to automatically provision resources for every new business requirement.

In totality, HP has signed 15 clients for its Converged Infrastructure portfolio.

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