HP Aims Data Center Management Services at SMBs

Hewlett-Packard today announced the availability of a series of services designed for small-to-midsize businesses with their own data centers that are looking to move to a cloud-based environment.

SMBs are usually more budget- and personnel-constrained than large enterprises, something HP (NYSE: HPQ) is acutely aware of. Among other issues, these companies often don’t have the money to build out a new data center while still incurring the costs of running an old one.

HP thinks it can help by offering assistance in reprovisioning a data center while it’s still in use. That’s one of many services designed to help an SMB wring the most value out of the infrastructure it has in place. The services are all aimed at companies with a data center with less than 5,000 square feet and are offered through HP’s channel partners instead of direct from HP.

“The policy is designed so we can act within our stated policy of driving enterprise-class services deeper into the SMB markets through our channel partners, and so that we can structure this for the channel partners to be able to resell it instead of doing it ourselves,” Ian Jagger, worldwide marketing manager of Infrastructure and Operations in HP Technology Services, told InternetNews.com.

HP offers three assessment services to its customers. The Basic Capacity Analysis provides a facility view of the data center, not an IT view. It looks at what the building has and compares its overall capabilities to current and future demands on workloads to get a real view on capacity, said Jagger.

The Infrastructure Condition and Capacity Analysis provides a client with a look at the mechanical, electrical and plumbing capacity of their data center, again comparing current capacity with what they will need in the future. Finally, the Energy Efficiency Analysis helps clients assess their data center’s energy demands and look for areas of improvement.

One Multivendor, Integrated Service Agreement

HP’s new offerings also include Multivendor Support Services to help clients increase service levels and reduce the complexity and costs of managing heterogeneous IT environments, since hardly anyone uses just one provider’s products in their data center. HP will offer one integrated service agreement to manage all products in the data center.

HP Insight Remote Support monitors the data center systems 24/7, issues alerts to problems and fixes if it can. This covers not just HP equipment but IBM, Dell and Sun servers, Sun Solaris on HP ProLiant servers, Cisco IP telephony networks, Windows, Citrix, VMware and Linux-based servers.

HP Active Chat provides real-time Web chat support for problem resolution on select HP server and storage products, while HP Data Center Training Symposium is a series of classes to be held around the country to offer custom training to IT managers.

All of these services are available now from HP Technology Services.

Andy Patrizio is a senior editor at Internetnews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.