HP Acquires Talking Blocks Services Management Suite
Much
of the progress in Virtual Computing portfolios for all of the systems
vendors has been made via acquisition and HP is no exception to that
rule.
Each company is eager to offer a complete portfolio as quickly
as possible and there are plenty of good, small software companies
out there with excellent products which, given the economic environment,
are only too happy to be acquired, often at bargain prices.
HP
is acquiring Talking Blocks, a web services software management company
that will provide additional function to HP’s Utility Data Center
(UDC) and OpenView offerings, both part of their Adaptive Enterprise
initiative.
The
Talking Blocks Management Suite will permit software running on a
variety of platforms to be managed by HP via shared security, version
control, integration, and monitoring services, linking applications
and managing their performance by assigning appropriate system resources
(provisioning, in the new terminology).
Among its neat tricks, Talking Blocks offers the ability to
link J2EE and .NET environments.
The
new acquisition helps give IT resources an insight into business processes,
so that resource priorities can be better aligned.
As
with all of the systems vendors who are creating portfolios partly
by internal development, partly by acquisition, the challenge lies
mainly in the execution of integrating their new prize with their
existing offering.
HP
Emphasizes Grid Computing
Grid
computing is rapidly moving from an interesting science experiment
to a mainstream commercial computing tool.
Sun has made Grid part of its N1 offering.
HP,
which has long offered Grid functionality (like many others) via the
Globus Toolkit, is now offering new consulting services, based on
grids, to customers who need to manage large groups of servers and
storage systems.
HP’s Grid Resource Topology Designer visualizes the customer’s
architectural grid, with all of their hardware in place, via its GUI
interface.
The designer then estimates whether the required grid resources
are available.
HP
already uses Globus as an enabler of its UDC, so it should be able
to expand this experience to a broader view of a commercial grid market.
An
interest in grid computing isn’t limited to systems vendors.
Oracle is focusing its newest version of its Oracle data base
on grid capabilities.
HP has also announced, in partnership with Oracle, support
for the new 10G (G for Grid) Oracle database, and new performance
benchmarks on HP hardware.
In
some sense, it’s getting hard to tell where a modern IT systems architecture
ends and a grid begins – perhaps they’re rapidly becoming part of
the same thing.
Just as we’re beginning not to notice whether a network is
contained in a single location or whether it is widely geographically
distributed; whether a system is made up of identical or very different
hardware systems and operating environments, and just where the data
is – as long as it all works smoothly together, delivering predictable
results with excellent performance.
That
was the goal all along.
We just seem to – suddenly – be getting a lot closer.
