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There's no question that IT environments have grown progressively more powerful. Unfortunately, they have also grown significantly more complex. Today, that complexity serves as a major obstacle for organisations of all types and sizes as they strive to achieve better business outcomes. Luckily, IT consolidation has proven its ability to replace complexity with simplicity, while enhancing power and control. That's why more and more companies are looking to HP and its portfolio of consolidation services for help with their IT consolidation initiatives. And increasingly, HP is advising its customers to make sure network consolidation is an element of any consolidation plan.

A focus on the network

Servers and storage are usually the first areas that come to mind in terms of consolidation. However, network consolidation is just as important to achieving optimum results. The existence of multiple and independent networks dramatically increases the cost and the complexity of managing the overall IT infrastructure. At the same time, multiple networks offer multiple ways to penetrate your company's security perimeter, potentially putting all of your data at risk. Finally, they make it more difficult and costly to keep pace with new business requirements and comply with regulations and constraints covering data privacy, access, archiving, and integrity. That's why it is essential to include the network in any consolidation initiative.  

HP's proven network consolidation solution

HP has developed a comprehensive network lifecycle services portfolio that has proven its ability to help companies like yours architect and design, deploy and integrate, manage and support an end-to-end network consolidation solution. The solution addresses all four phases typically involved in an IT consolidation "journey": colocation, hardware/software integration, application integration, and IT utility. It also encompasses all key elements, delivering: 

• LAN and WAN solutions to support the high-performance and high-availability requirements of consolidated data-centre and application environments
• High-capacity data-centre interconnectivity and wide area networking (WAN)
• Networking requirements to support data replication, business continuity, and disaster recovery
• Network security
• Voice/data convergence
• Implementation and migration planning, strategies and processes
• Multi-vendor services and support vendor consolidation

Security is significantly enhanced by HP's Adaptive Network Architecture (ANA), a combination of HP's patented and patent-pending network compartmentalisation methodology, tools, processes, services, expertise and best practices. This new approach to network architecture and design builds security into the network upfront, rather than bolting it on after-the-fact.

Who benefits most from network consolidation?

IT consolidation in general delivers impressive results in terms enhanced manageability, security, and agility, as well as in cost savings. However, if you have any of the following characteristics/requirements, network consolidation should be a priority and will also quickly provide you with direct and measurable benefits.    

• Application performance issues for end-user applications that support either mobile workers and/or remote offices. 
• Plans for consolidating into blade servers with embedded switches. This can have major networking implications. 
• The need to establish high-capacity data centre interconnectivity to support storage area networking (SAN), data replication, and layer 2/3 transport after completing a data centre consolidation initiative. 
• A mission critical environment. 
• Security concerns around access, data protection, legal/regulatory requirements, governance, centralised policy management and/or cost of security enforcement. 
• Plans for a next generation WAN (MPLS) migration, requiring integration of the Enterprise network with the new WAN transport