UDC is HP’s answer to rival IBM’s On Demand computing initiative and Sun Microsystems Inc’s N1 initiative. All of these projects want to virtualize server, storage, networking equipment and other components and make them self managing (with automatic provisioning of resources based on usage policies for applications and end users) and self healing to the larger degree possible.

UDC was announced as a concept, but Nick van der Zweep, director of utility computing for HP’s Enterprise Systems Group, says that the company has actually deployed the UDC product at an undisclosed number of companies and has upwards of 40 large enterprises who are examining the concept and the productization of it by HP.

To simplify, UDC conceived of as the operating system for the data center, a kind of meta-operating system that controls all manner of IT hardware and systems software. Physically, it is a set of HP servers (both PA-RISC and Intel-based machines are used), running Oracle Corp databases and HP’s OpenView and Utility Controller software, the former enabling systems management hooks into equipment outside of the UDC black box and the latter for controlling how the virtualization of resources on servers, storage arrays, and networks is managed.

UDC is, says van der Zweep, aimed at the company with over 100 computing nodes (which can each be large SMP servers or smaller midrange products) that doesn’t mind spending $500,000 to $1m on UDC because it will very quickly pay for itself by helping make all of those servers run more efficiently. In such a data center, tens of millions of dollars of hardware and software are humming along, running at 10% to 15% efficiency at most sites. If UDC can double the efficiency of the operations of these machines and cut down on human administration of these resources, the potential economic savings are enormous.

Under the revised alliance announced today, Cisco and HP engineers will ensure that Cisco’s Catalyst 6500 Series switches, PIX 515 Series firewalls, and 2950 routers are interoperable with the UDC’s controller software. These Cisco products already have virtual networking technologies, and now the UDC will be able to manage them as it does HP’s own networking equipment. In the future, HP and Cisco will deliver capabilities of the UDC controller to take over the management of various Cisco application software.

The UDC controller has been set up to manage servers from HP and Sun, and will soon be able to manage servers from IBM Corp. It can similarly manage storage and virtualize it on HP disk arrays and competitive products from EMC Corp; van der Zweep says that drivers will soon be developed for other storage products. The UDC controller can reach into Linux, Windows, HP-UX, and Solaris environments. Presumably AIX is in the works, and maybe even MVS-z/OS and OS/400 are coming, too, for IBM platforms.

Perhaps most significantly, van der Zweep says that HP will be publishing an SDK for the UDC environment later this year, which will allow vendors of other equipment or software to write the drivers to plug into the Utility Controller software. The obvious companies to undertake this driver development are the vendors themselves, but in the case of competitors of HP, it may be third party systems integrators and outsourcing service providers, who are always looking for better ways to glue systems together and make them easier to manage, who will use the UDC SDK to create the drivers that HP hasn’t done to date.

Source: Computerwire