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Dec. 4, 2008

In an effort to better consolidate and tighten up its IT infrastructure, a project other large IT firms like Dell have implemented in the past, HP announced yesterday that it has completed its 3-year revamping initiative of all its IT operations.

The move cuts $1 billion in direct costs out of the company and reduces its annual power consumption by over 60 percent.

Randy Mott, Hewlett-Packard's chief information officer, has been able to condense the company's 85 data centers down to "six fully redundant, highly virtualization data centers" over the past three years.

The six facilities currently give HP a footprint of 342,000 square feet of floor space, with the ability to scale to more than double its capacity.

Mott, who joined HP three years ago, was behind Dell's massive internal IT consolidation project in 2004 as well, where he squeezed the company's twenty-two data centers into six highly-efficient facilities with lots of room to spare.

Mott also says the company reduced its 6,000-strong application portfolio down to around 1,500 and became the first customer for its HP NonStop-based Neoview data warehouse product, which was introduced in April of last year.

Through this part of the project, "HP has consolidated 762 data warehouses and data marts down to a single data warehouse running on a Neoware NonStop cluster."

Part of Mott's goals with HP also involved cutting down the company's server count from 25,000 to around 14,000. Although the exact number hasn't been released by the company, HP says it has reduced the number of servers by around 40 percent, which means HP currently has around 15,000 servers for its own IT needs.

Not unlike other IT giants like IBM with its well-known "Project Big Green" initiative, HP has been working on popularizing its own Green Business Technology services as well.

Perhaps the biggest advantage to all of this has been the energy and cost savings Mott has been able to bring to HP. The company says it has been able to cut its networking costs by 50 percent while tripling network bandwidth and update its power and cooling requirements effectively enough to reduce its energy usage by 60 percent.

This likely contributed to why HP was ranked at the top of the latest "Green Data Center" Vendor Matrix two months ago by ABI Research.

Last month, HP updated its Thermal Logic portfolio, adding power-capping server technologies and energy-efficiency services designed to reduce operating costs and extend the life of data centers.

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Source: Hewlett-Packard.