HP Software Universe 2009 Hamburg Day 2

by Michael Procopio

Just over 3200 attendees at the show this year.

Each of the last eight years at the European Universe, Ulrich Pfeiffer, CTO for IT Management in EMEA creates a Live in Action demo showcasing the fictitious Full Throttle Company (FTC) on mainstage. Live in Action is a demonstration of HP Software integrated into a complete solution.

Ulrich Pfeiffer

This year, the Live in Action team recalled Hamburg of the early 1960s when this German city gave the Beatles a start before the group became a mainstream sensation. The demo featured the HP Performance Optimized Datacenter (“POD”), a datacenter in a container, along with music by the re-Beatles band and an on-stage yellow submarine in a disaster recovery scenario involving a flooded datacenter.

The POD is a standard container completely fitted with servers, storage and HVAC. You can see the POD demo here.

BTO (Business Technology Optimization) solutions demoed live on stage showed capabilities in three areas: 1) business and disaster recovery; 2) service recovery and web security; and 3) business improvements to avoid service disruptions and enhance capacity via virtualization management.

Disaster recovery highlighted HP Operations Orchestration configuring the POD to the state of the original datacenter.

Web security started with finding the problem using End User Monitoring, HP SiteScope and HP Problem Isolation. The problem was a hacked web site. The knowledge base in HP Service Manager (SM) which was populated during QA testing by HP Quality Center has the solution to the problem.   QA had not originally done security testing on every release but it is now added to their plan in HP Quality Center (QC) to run HP Security Center.

HP WebInspect, was run directly from SM. The test failed and WebInspect automatically created a ticket in SM for the QA team.  Once the QC test passes the SM ticket is automatically closed.

The website having the problem was supporting a reseller using a configuration utility to order Snowmobiles, a new business line for FTC. When Ulrich, playing CIO for FTC, called the reseller to tell him service was restored the reseller claimed his SLA (Service Level Agreement) was violated and would not pay. Ulrich brought up HP Service Level Manager to show that while any further downtime would violate the SLA, it was currently in tact.

Now that the problems is solved the infrastructure manager looks to see how the failure happened and what can be done to prevent it in the future.

They review the infrastructure using HP Asset Manager and Operations Manager Virtualization Smart Plug-in, both now running on Linux. The CIO wants this Virtualization data to show up in his 360 degree dashboard and it does.

It is much more fun to watch and it was video recorded which will be up after the holidays.

Related items:

• HP Operations Orchestration


• HP SiteScope


• HP End User Management


• HP Problem Isolation


• HP Quality Center


• HP Application Security Center


• HP Service Manager


• HP Service Level Management


• HP WebInspect software


• HP Asset Manager software


• HP Operations Manager software


• HP Smart Plug-in for Virtualization