HP today announced at the VMworld 2012 conference in San Francisco that it's expanding its HP Converged Cloud portfolio with new solutions for VMware vCloud Suite 5.1, enabling clients to transform traditional virtualization deployments into private and hybrid cloud environments with less risk and complexity.

Combined with VMware vCloud Suite 5.1, HP CloudSystem doubles VM density, reduces network complexity, and provides added flexibility to support almost any workload, says HP.

Introduced in April, HP Converged Cloud extends the power of the cloud across infrastructure, data and applications. Based on a single architecture, HP Converged Cloud helps integrate many combinations of private, managed and public clouds, as well as traditional IT, providing workload portability as well as dynamic scaling. [Disclosure: HP and VMware are sponsors of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The expanded HP Converged Cloud portfolio from VMworld enables clients to:

• Reduce complexity of building and managing cloud with integrated solutions.
• Accelerate cloud adoption with comprehensive security and compliance controls that can be automatically applied to virtual machines (VMs).
• Decrease the risk of data loss with automated policy-based data protection.

vCloud Suite 5.1
The HP announcement dovetails with VMware's unveiling of vCloud Suite 5.1, which delivers its software-defined datacenter, an architecture for implementing cloud computing. vCloud Suite 5.1 extends the benefits of virtualization to every domain in the datacenter—compute, storage, networking, and the associated availability and security services, says VMware.

The software-defined datacenter architecture abstracts all hardware resources and pools them into aggregate capacity, enabling automation to safely and efficiently dole it out as needed for applications. Tenants or customers utilizing the software-defined datacenter can have their own virtual datacenters with a logically isolated collection of all the virtual compute, storage, networking and security resources they are used to.

On Tuesday, VMware CTO Steve Herrod unveilved an enterprise mobility solution suite called Horizon. It goes a long way to helping enterprises deliver and control applications and data that can be accessed via most smartphones, tablets and PCs.

New HP CloudSystem capabilities integrated with the VMware vCloud Suite 5.1 include:

• HP Cloud System optimized for VMware, which provides faster time to revenue with pre-integrated solutions that include HP Converged Infrastructure and cloud management from HP and VMware.
• Auto-flexing feature, which reduces response time to business requests and improves overall service levels by enabling VMware administrators to provision hardware for vCloud Director to automate the scaling of converged infrastructure.
• VM importing, which simplifies clients’ path to the cloud by easily importing running VMs into an HP CloudSystem without downtime or reconfiguration.
• HP Cloud Maps for VMware, which accelerates the design of cloud services and automates the deployment of virtual applications using pre-packaged, optimized HP CloudSystem templates.

Data protection enhancements
Also, at VMworld, Autonomy, an HP Company, announced a major feature enhancement to HP Data Protector 7 that delivers integrated security for vCloud Director 5.1, providing fully automated, policy-based protection for cloud environments.

This is a key offering from Autonomy and provides policy-based data protection for an array of configurations within a virtual datacenter. It also allows organizations to control how often they back up their data, as well as how much data to retain and store.

The solution enables service providers to offer flexible protection options within multi-tenant cloud environments. Organizations that use vSphere and seek to maximize storage efficiency for VM backup can leverage Data Protector 7 to de-duplicate data anywhere—at the application source, backup server, or target appliance—and centrally manage the de-duplicated data movement across the enterprise for disaster recovery.

Using Data Protector 7, customers can eliminate protection gaps found in cloud-based deployments. Traditional data-protection solutions often fail to understand how much data to back up and the level of data protection required for the diverse types of data that reside within an organization.

Customers can also reduce the risk of data loss, as business critical backup policies are automatically applied to new VMs within a virtual datacenter. And with HP StoreOnce Catalyst replication feature, customers can attain back-up at speeds of up to 100 terabytes per hour, three times faster than the leading industry storage alternative, says HP.

PCI industry security
HP has also partnered with VMware to offer a converged payment card industry (PCI) Compliance Security Solution Stack that provides a single security framework to address diverse virtual and cloud infrastructures. The solution provides comprehensive, cost effective and easy-to-manage protection that enables strong security, beyond simply meeting compliance requirements.

The PCI Compliance Security Solution Stack is a pre-certified reference architecture for testing applications, defending against cyber threats, as well as providing enterprise-wide visibility across virtual and cloud infrastructures. The solution accelerates the path to compliance covering 110 of the 200 PCI requirements, spanning all 12 regulation sections.

The solution leverages market-leading technology from HP TippingPoint, HP ArcSight, HP Atalla and VMware cloud infrastructure, allowing users to:

• Secure card Information with the Atalla Network Security Processor and HP Atalla Enterprise Secure Key Manager which validate, securely process as well as encrypts stores of authentication, stripe, personal identification and personal account numbers.
• Manage encryption keys throughout their lifecycle with HP Atalla Enterprise Secure Key Manager.
• Develop secure cardholder data application processing which does not contain known vulnerabilities with HP Fortify Software.
• Protect the network perimeter with HP TippingPoint Intrusion Protection System by preventing malicious attempts to attack card processing platforms.
• Build more secure web-based card processing applications built with HP WebInspect, which checks for OWASP vulnerabilities.
• Monitor and log entire PCI stack activity through HP ArcSight Logger, HP ArcSight IdentityView and HP ArcSight ESM.