HP to Open IT Infrastructure Management APIs

Taking a big step toward fostering the development of an open software-defined data center, HP this week announced it will publish open application programming interfaces (APIs) that anyone can use to program its infrastructure. The company made the announcement at the annual HP Discover conference in Las Vegas.

Paul Miller, vice president of converged application systems at HP, says the HP Composable Infrastructure API is actually only phase one of a later Project Synergy effort the company kicked off last year. Later this year HP will publish open APIs for its entire IT management software stack.

“This phase is really about infrastructure as code,” says Miller. “Via a single line of code IT organizations will be able to provision HP infrastructure.”

To support this effort HP this week also announced an HP Composable Infrastructure Partner Program, which counts Chef Software, Docker, Puppet Labs, Ansible, VMware, and Schneider Electric among its first members.

The goal, says Miller, is to make use of open APIs that IT organizations can use to “compose” infrastructure from any number of HP or third-party management tools. To facilitate that process HP will make available software development kits (SDKs) for its APIs in July.

Upgrades Beef Up Data Center Management Software

At the core of that effort is HP OneView, the management software that HP relies on to unify the management of its infrastructure. Via the addition of REST APIs in the version 2.0 release of OneView rolled out this week, Miller says IT organizations can now essentially program HP infrastructure.

The latest release of OneView automatically updates itself in data center environments consisting of equipment sold by HP. The issue that most IT management platforms have is that it’s difficult for them to keep track of ongoing changes to the data center environments.

“The issue is what do you day two after the IT management platform is deployed,” says Miller. “With automatic updates it’s now possible to keep up to speed with those changes.”

OneView is designed to unify processes, user interfaces, and APIs across HP server, storage, and HP Virtual Connect networking devices.

With this release HP is adding more server profile templates to make it easy to define firmware and driver baselines as well as server, LAN, and SAN settings in one place, all of which can be updated multiple times as the data center environment evolves.

In addition, those templates can be migrated between data centers and used to recover workloads across server platform types, configurations, and generations.

OneView 2.0 also delivers additional automation, proactive monitoring, and guidance for storage area network (SAN) administrators along with support for storage devices using Fiber over Ethernet (FCoE) connections. It now proactively identifies and alerts administrators to zoning errors, broken path, and orphaned volumes in addition to making configuration reports available.

HP also announced that OneView has been integrated with HP Virtualization Performance Viewer (vPV) to make it easier to plan capacity requirements, understand the impact of maintenance operations, and mitigate configuration risks by detecting how virtualization clusters are striped across HP BladeSystem enclosures.