HP rolled out enhanced new offerings to increase collaboration between development, testing, infrastructure and operations teams, helping organizations break down IT silos so they can quickly deliver high-quality, applications for hybrid and cloud environments. The updated versions of HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and HP Performance Center (PC) enable organizations to improve delivery of applications with new Lab Management Automation and Continuous Application Performance Delivery features.
“The way applications are being built is changing dramatically,” and HP is addressing emerging requirements, Subbu Iyer, vice president, products and strategy, applications and software for HP, tells 5 Minute Briefing, by helping organizations adopt and instill DevOps best practices and processes within their organization. “The intent is that we can break the traditional wall that has existed between apps and ops, streamlining the flow of application delivery to the operations team so that business value can be delivered in a seamless manner to the end users.“
HP Lab Management Automation for HP ALM 11.5 and HP PC 11.5 accelerate the deployment of high-quality applications by automating the configuration of testing environments to align with real-world scenarios, such as private and hybrid clouds. This helps ensure the desired performance, functionality and security of applications prior to production. “Lab Management Automation is agnostic to cloud models, cloud infrastructure, and hypervisors,” says Iyer. “This allows for much more automation to be infused into this process.”
HP is also announcing Performance Center (PC) 11.5 software for application performance testing in order to improve application quality prior to release. The software features a new capability called Continuous Application Performance Delivery, which enables operations and testing teams to easily share real-time performance data for use in application performance testing scripts. In addition, clients can identify and diagnose potential performance bottlenecks by importing production monitoring data from HP Business Service Management software and third-party tools, and further accelerate test configuration by importing application monitoring metrics from HP SiteScope.
The new capabilities are focused around providing DevOps and the application delivery teams with a set of methodologies to provide for more automation with the lab management automation capabilities, and also infusing more collaboration between operations and application teams with the continuous application delivery capability, Iyer explains.
The HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and HP Performance Center (PC) introductions were made in conjunction with HP’s announcement of the expansion of its Converged Cloud portfolio, which includes solutions for delivering converged cloud services for the airline industry; building hybrid cloud environments; managing the next generation of cloud applications; increasing office productivity with cloud print solution; and closing the IT cloud expertise skills gap.
“Cloud offers an opportunity as well as challenges for organizations,” says Iyer. “As organizations move to more of a hybrid delivery and hybrid consumption model with in-house applications and services combined with off-premise applications and services which are consumed from the cloud, IT can play a big role in providing the brokerage in terms of which services are the right ones for the organization, which support the business goals, and which are compliant and provide the right level of SLA commitment.”
Whether organizations are using the traditional data center infrastructure or deploying a private cloud or a managed private infrastructure, or even a public cloud, as they look at tapping into these different models, depending on the criticality of the service and the criticality of the application, they want a common architecture under which they can make these choices - primarily because they don’t want to be locked into a specific architecture or specific deployment, he explains. “They want choice so that they can look at these various models as portable so if they decide to start with a private cloud for a particular service or application, and then choose to move pieces of it to the public cloud – that move can be as transparent as possible to the organization.”
According to Iyer, when it comes to choice, cloud deployments need to be heterogeneous and as agnostic as possible across platforms and hypervisors. “The HP Converged Cloud actually lets an organization build, manage, and secure applications and services across these different deployment models.”
More information is available about HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and HP Performance Center (PC) at www.hp.com.