Monday, December 10, 2012

HP Software offerings on Security Intelligence & Risk Management


Any modern business is under constant threat, either from outside or inside and unless proper measures are in place, it is exposed to a major loss of information, revenue and can even face a shutdown.

The HP Security Intelligence and Risk Management platform enables your business to take a proactive approach to security that integrates information correlation, deep application analysis and network-level defense mechanisms—unifying the components of a complete security program and reducing risk across your enterprise. 

HP ArcSight Security Intelligence platform helps safeguard your business by giving you complete visibility into activity across the IT infrastructure: external threats such as malware and hackers; internal threats such as data breaches and fraud; risks from application flaws and configuration changes.

HP Fortify Software Security Center is a suite of tightly integrated solutions for fixing and preventing security vulnerabilities in applications. It eliminates software security risk by ensuring that all business software is trustworthy and in compliance with internal and external security mandates. 

HP Tipping Point Intrusion Prevention System protects against advanced, targeted threats, delivers in-line inspected throughput speeds ranging from 20 Mbps up to 16 Gbps. For more information read the article elsewhere on this blog. 

HP Enterprise View  delivers decision intelligence to the CISO by providing real-time graphical and report-based identification of risks to the business within the IT infrastructure. Data is aggregated from risk assessments, vulnerability assessments, security configuration management monitoring, security event correlation and compliance state.
You can read an interesting Business White Paper on creating a defense system for your business at :


Tuesday, August 21, 2012

HP Service Guard Solution for Linux

HP has combined it’s expertise in Unix and x86 environments to deliver industry leading availability and flexibility solution for mission critical x86 infrastructure with Service Guard solution for Linux.
HP Serviceguard Solutions for Linux are built from the same code base as HP Serviceguard Solutions on HP-UX. That means they have the same exceptional quality and attention to preserving data integrity. They deliver reliable availability and better system integration over your entire x86 environment. Availability, virtualization, and disaster recovery all work together, offering you greater flexibility when it comes to IT infrastructure choices.
HP Serviceguard Solutions for Linux are built to address the financial, business and operational impacts of downtime in a mission-critical x86 Infrastructure. With Serviceguard, you can define, implement, and manage solutions that help to secure the infrastructure, protect data and information, and align business continuity objectives to business requirements.
Maximize uptime with HP Serviceguard for Linux. HP Serviceguard for Linux does this by moving services between servers, so quickly and transparently that users may not even realize it happened. Serviceguard can move applications automatically, to protect you from a failure, or when you decide you want to use it, such as when need to perform maintenance.
If you need more information, check out
And

PA RISC Environments on Integrity servers

Good news for all PA RISC legacy servers users!  HP now offers a brand new solution called HP 9000 Containers to help transition your entire application ecosystem to Integrity servers running HP-UX 11i v3.
HP 9000 Containers leverages HP-UX Containers, HP's shared OS virtualization technology, to offer application isolation and security for these HP 9000 applications running within the HP 9000 Container in an HP-UX Container. Clone the entire application ecosystem on your HP 9000 HP-UX system and move it over to an Integrity system.
You can now consolidate multiple HP 9000 ecosystems onto HP Integrity in a matter of days, with new HP 9000 Containers. These new tools virtualize PA-RISC environments on Integrity servers to eliminate resource burn with fast, easy migrations that shrink time and costs. Such HP UX environments transitioned from legacy PA RISC based HP 9000 servers to new upgraded infrastructure of Integrity servers can experience two to four times performance boost.
To know more about HP 9000 Containers read this document :

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

HP Proliant Gen 8 Servers

Recently I attended the HP Proliant Gen 8 launch in India.  I was expecting just a new generation of servers with the latest processors introduced by Intel. But that was not entirely correct. What I learned was that every HP ProLiant Gen8 server has over 150 new, customer-driven innovations that automate administrative tasks and improve application uptime and performance.
All these new technologies and development stems from Project Voyager, a 2 year, $ 300 million HP Engineering and development initiative to eliminate many manual tasks across the IT Lifecycle.  The aim is to create systems so intelligent that they virtually take care of themselves.  The Gen8 servers is the first step on this far reaching mission.
Basically all these innovations revolve around four main pillars, as briefly described below :
Integrated life cycle automation   Briefly this includes :
HP Intelligent provisioning.   The systems are online 3 times faster.  (all firmware, drives and tools preloaded and ready to deploy)
HP Active Health System.  Automate monitoring , diagnostics and alerting. (SmartMemory, SmartDrive. 1600 parameters monitored and logged separately. So problems analysis is 5 times faster
HP Smart Update.   (Systematically update servers with one click simplicity. Updates are 3 times faster with 93% less downtime)

Dynamic Workload Acceleration
Solid state optimized.  Next gen smart array controllers, 6 times the performance of previous generation.
Smart Data protection.  Advance data mirroring. Faster Raid setup. Lifetime data retention with  Flash backed cache.
Smart Data Devices.  Workload aware intelligence for real time application tuning and acceleration.

Automated Energy Optimization
HP Location discovery services.  Optmize workload placement with servers that self identify and inventory themselves.
HP Thermal discovery services.   To reduce energy usage and increase compute capacity.
HP Power Discovery services.  Eliminate power configuration errors and precisely track power usage by rack and server.

Proactive Service & Support
HP Insight Online.  Industry’s first cloud based IT management and support portal.
Proactive services.  Innovative new services based on HP Proactive insight architecture.
For more information please visit :

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Socialcast from VMware

Socialcast, started in 2005, creates and deploys social software to thousands of companies across industries. It was acquired by VMware in May 2011.
One of the major pain areas for companies is engaging employees and increasing productivity due to communication overload and knowledge silos. Socialcast creats a simple, data rich collaborative space where employees can find information from applications, systems and people across the enterprise. It creates an awareness on what everyone is doing, saying and thinking in the company.
It increases efficiency by opening new lines of communications and enables faster data flow between applications and various users and teams.  By allowing collaborations and discussions to happen on the site, it avoids unnecessary meeting and mail trails which improves productivity.
This enterprise social network creates a central hub for information sharing and knowledge does not remain in silos with each employee.  People can learn about the organization tree, access the executives, share their ideas and know what is happening in the company. 
In short, with Socialcast, companies can establish a open culture in the company, give them the experience of working together without being in the same room or location, improve the flow of information and ideas and benefit from these ideas which otherwise would have gone unheard.
For more information visit www.socialcast.com

Coud Discovey Workshop by HP

I had a chance to attend the Cloud Discovery Workshop organized by HP for one of our clients.
The format was a welcome change. The agenda, layout, discussion points were very different from normal workshops / seminars.  It is a full day slide free workshop, which lets you visualize all aspects around cloud computing, using cloud services or becoming a cloud service provider.
The HP Technology Services team, through their knowledge pool, interactions with customers globally, experience and industry best practices, has defined 9-10 key topics, on which discussion need to happen when an organization  embarks on a cloud journey.
The carefully selected topics cover a wide range, consisting of cloud computing trends, concepts, business value and ROI, technology needs, management and process capabilities, cloud enablement of applications, multi tenant security, compliance, change management , service governance and many more.
It is not a traditional sitting down format. Instead, the group gathers around a placard of each topic and discusses various aspects of each topic.  It is a highly interactive discussion, where the HP team acts more as a enabler / catalyst for the discussion and only interjects where some information is to be shared.  Each of these discussions helps to bring forth ideas, inhibitions, organizational readiness related to that topic.  These points are captured by the HP team.
Once each topic is covered, the group gathers around a planner and writes down the current and desired state of the company on each topic and the action points to reach the desired state.  A timeline is decided for each timeline.
At  the end of the workshop, based on the inputs captured though out the day and the final planner, HP gives a detailed report to the customer on its cloud awareness, readiness, and the roadmap to cloud.
The most unique thing about this workshop is that it is a purely consultative approach and nowhere in the discussion any HP product related to cloud is discussed.

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Two approaches to manage and use “Big Data”

We are in an era of explosive data growth. Huge amount of data, both user generated (digital photos, videos, social media) and machine generated (financial analysis, behavior tracking) is putting enormous pressure on the existing infrastructures and creating new challenges.  Some of the challenges include, designing solutions for containing the data, efficient analysis to get the correct information and improved performance to manage the huge workloads to reduce time to information.
I am enclosing the links to two white papers which discuss the solutions to these challenges.
The one from Netapp talks about how Netapp has divided the solution sets to manage Big Data into 3 main areas – Analytics, Bandwidth and Content, or “The Big Data ABCs”
The other from HP-Vertica talks about data compression, column oriented storage to lower costs and accelerate performance.