Underpinning the messaging at this week’s HP Discover 2013 summit in Barcelona, Hewlett-Packard announced that it has joined forces with nonprofit environmental organization Conservation International (CI) to help scientists take proactive steps against ecological threats. The collaboration produced HP Earth Insights, an integrated Big Data solution that couples Vertica database technology with a custom dashboarding tool called the Wildlife Picture Index Analytics System. The platform, which already stores three terabytes of “critical biodiversity information,” runs on ProLiant servers and provides near real time analytical capabilities for users via ElitePad enterprise tablets.

“Until now, scientists had to manually collect and analyze this data from tropical forests – often taking weeks, months or more to analyze information – making it difficult to identify new patterns and intervene to protect biodiversity. HP’s solutions are analyzing the data 89 percent faster and transforming the field of environmental science,” HP CEO Meg Whitman wrote in a blog.

Earth Insights has been deployed across 16 tropical forests by CI, the Smithsonian Institution and the Wildlife Conservation Society as part of the Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) Network. It’s used to collect photos and climate measurements from sensors, identify patterns in that data, and share the resulting insights with protected area managers.

Eyeing a broader market, Hewlett Packard on Monday introduced a set of pre-integrated appliances for Big Data and cloud workloads. ConvergedSystem for Virtualization can run as many as 1,000 virtual machines at a lower price point than the competition, while ConvergedSystem 300 for Vertica offers a 70 percent cost-per-terabyte reduction compared to traditional data warehouses. The third addition to the product line is a virtual desktop platform that can deliver six times faster graphics performance than alternatives.