HP kicked off its annual Technology Forum in Las Vegas, Nev., with announcements of new servers and blades, as well as a number of solutions that aim to simplify deployment and management of virtualized environments and a new solution for management of data center power consumption.

The company said in a statement its new products were building on its Converged Infrastructure strategy ÔÇô a blueprint for clients to address rising sprawl, complexity and maintenance costs.

The three new ProLiant servers have new automation capabilities, enabling faster application delivery and better resource utilization, improving ROI. With memory footprints of up to 2 terabytes and "self-healing capabilities" the new rack-mount machines enable 200 percent better availability, according to HP's own research that compared mean time between critical failures of ProLiant DL785 G5 and the new DL980 G7 servers.


The new ProLiant DL980 G7 server

The machines are optimized for data-intensive workloads to reduce data center footprint with consolidation ration of up to 91-to-1.

There are seven new ProLiant G7 server blades, optimized for virtualized environments, including industry's first blade with 1 terabyte of memory and integrated 10 Gb Virtual Connect FlexFabric technology for I/O scalability. According to the vendor, the systems are capable of running up to four times the amount of virtual machines supported by competitive blades.

To address sprawl at the network edge, HP has expanded its Virtual Connect portfolio to include automated, wire-once network connectivity, converging data and storage networks. The capability is achieved by deploying the new FlexFabric module ÔÇô a single device that connects servers to any Fibre Channel, Ethernet and iSCSI network ÔÇô eliminating the need for multiple interconnects.

FlexFabric is built into the new G7 blades. HP says it has sold more than three million Virtual Connect ports in the first half of fiscal 2010, doubling over sales during the same period one year prior.

The company has also integrated its BladeSystem Matrix software with its Server Automation solution, aiming to simplify deployment of virtual IT environments with one-touch, self-service application provisioning. The new converged infrastructure offering allows quicker deployment on private-cloud infrastructures.

One of the customers that deployed the BladeSystem Matrix is McKesson, a provider of IT solutions for the health care sector.

"HP BladeSystem Matrix provides a self-service, template-based portal using McKesson and HP system best practices, that allows us to quickly provision blades ÔÇô 90 this year ÔÇô within a minute each," said in a statement Merritte Stidston, who works at the McKesson CTO's office. "This ability gives us consistent and repeatable results, which saves my team precious time to accomplish other tasks while reducing build errors."

Another solution announced at the Tech Forum was Intelligent Power Discovery, a solution that enables automated, energy-aware network between ProLiant servers, third-party facility management tools and data center power infrastructure. The new software builds on HP's existing Data Center Smart Grid solutions, addressing the issue of power over-provisioning in data centers. According to HP, the software enhances transparency of data center power usage by generating real-time graphical representation of energy consumption across servers and facilities.

Finally, the new StoreOnce solution automates data deduplication to save data center storage resources. Using a single unified architecture, the new deduplication offering reduces complexity of using multiple deduplication processes and offerings, aiming to improve productivity and efficiency of data management.

According to HP, StoreOnce allows for up to 20 percent better performance and more than doubles the price/performance ratio of a "leading competitive offering." The industry-average deduplication ration is 20:1, going up to 50:1 under optimal circumstances.

According to the market research firm IDC, HP's blade server market share was 56.1 in the first quarter of 2010. The company controlled 39.2 percent of the market for x86 servers.