Wikibon CTO David Floyer has posted an extended article examining the significance of HP’s storage announcements at last week’s HP Discover conference for users on the Wikibon site. He sees the overall trend of HP’s development, the development of converged storage as a part of a larger unified infrastructure, as ushering in a new era of computing that Wikibon calls “Infrastructure 2.0.” 

Converged storage unifies the various HP storage technologies, both developed in-house and acquired in HP’s ongoing buying spree of best-of-breed entrepreneurial firms, on the underlying Store 360 Storage OS. This in turn supports virtualization using the hypervisor of the user’s choice (by design or accident, HP does not own a hyprvisor). HP supports this with Converged Virtual Storage including HP Systems Insight Manager and Storage Provisioning Manager. HP also offers converged utility storage with HP CloudSystem, which includes the same to HP utilities.

Floyer sees several important advantages for users in this system, starting with simplification of the overall architecture. This, he says, can allow IT to collapse the traditional four administrative silos – database, server, network, and storage – under a single application administrator or at most, in large enterprises, a two-level administration with an application/database administrator and an infrastructure administrator.

Overall this converged infrastructure brings storage closer to servers and applications and supports a virtualized, unified system across data centers and large organizations. This is the definition of the next generation of computing, which will offer the best of the old mainframe computing and of the more flexible modern server/storage technology, while providing much greater flexibility, simplicity, and speed of operations than either. Thus, he argues, HP is defining the next generation of IT.