HP announced new products, services and solutions to help customers simplify their virtualized environments to realize business benefits from the data center to the desktop.

Announced at VMworld 2008, HP's new offerings provide support for VMware technologies in four key areas: management software, virtualization services, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and server and storage infrastructures.

"Customers look to HP to implement virtualization projects and strategies that lower operational costs and reduce pressure on data center real estate," said Mark Linesch, vice president, Infrastructure Software, HP. "As a leading VMware partner, HP is advancing the state of virtualization to help our joint customers drive continued growth, manage operations and reduce enterprise-wide risk."

Brian Byun, vice president, Global Partners and Solutions, VMware, said, "VMware and HP have a long history of collaboration to help support customers' data center needs, spanning servers, desktops, storage and services. We are pleased to see the addition of HP products and services optimized for VMware virtualization, further expanding HP's comprehensive IT portfolio."

Information faster - zero-impact information backup and instant recovery of VMware

Protecting virtual machines and their application data with frequent backups and minimal impact to the virtual infrastructure has become one of the biggest information management challenges for technology organizations to overcome.

HP Data Protector software simplifies and centralizes automated data protection and recovery operations. This includes increased availability of critical applications with Zero Downtime Backup and Instant Recovery capabilities.

Now available for VMware environments, HP Data Protector Zero Downtime Backup and Instant Recovery tightly integrate with HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Arrays, giving customers zero-impact backup of mission-critical application data residing on virtual machines.

This integration also provides the recovery of both the virtual machine and critical data in seconds or minutes instead of hours.

"We are thrilled with HP Data Protector and VMware solutions to manage our data protection needs," said Peter Molbæk, IT operations manager, VIA University College, the third-largest educational institution in Denmark. "You cannot ask for a better solution than what HP has provided."

Planning and provisioning physical and virtual resources together

HP Insight Dynamics - VSE is the industry's first integrated solution to visualize, plan and change physical and virtual resources in the same way, improving data center efficiency and lowering cost. Combined with VMware VirtualCenter, the solution provides for cost-effective, high-availability and simplified provisioning of resources across the data center. HP Insight Dynamics - VSE with VMware VirtualCenter can pre-emptively move virtual machines to a different hardware platform before any downtime occurs.

The real-time capacity planning capabilities of Insight Dynamics - VSE let customers continuously analyze and optimize their server resources, both physical and virtual. With energy awareness built into the tool, users can optimize server configurations to lower power utilization.

"Our company's success depends on delivering quality business technology solutions to our hospitality industry customers," said Pete Simpson, vice president, Business Technology - Europe, Middle East and Africa, Micros Fidelio, a leading supplier of information systems to the hospitality industry. "HP Insight Dynamics - VSE is working to consolidate and virtualize our entire data center stack, resulting in greater flexibility and significant operational cost savings to give us a real competitive advantage."