By Lorre Bumgardner, Product Manager - HP Platforms/Partner management

Monday, April 27th marked a significant milestone in our 20+ year relationship with Microsoft. We are very excited about the news -- we launched the Insight Control suite for Microsoft System Center (ICE-SC) at Microsoft Management Summit. The first product of its kind, ICE-SC delivers a complete hardware infrastructure management solution directly in the System Center consoles.

What do I mean by "complete?" For example, "complete" to HP means things like total remote control (iLO), deep insight into ProLiant platforms, proactive virtual machine management (PRO pack), automated deployment (OSD), and power and performance management of the HP server infrastructure. Priced at $549 per managed server and backed by 24x7 support with free software updates, ICE-SC radically simplifies the management experience for HP customers who have standardized on Microsoft System Center.  There's even an upgrade for current iLO Advanced customers priced at just $289.

Why now, and why charge for this functionality, you may ask? HP knows that most other server vendors are providing some of this functionality, such as OSD and PRO packs, for free. But HP's approach is to offer a complete, robust solution rather than just basic functionality that won't do everything our customers need. In addition to staying very close to our customer base, we've done a lot of research to determine what HP can do to make life simpler for the people who use our products.  ICE-SC is the result of significant feedback from customers, extensive research and more than a year of working with the folks at Microsoft on development. 

The "easy" approach would be to deliver minimal integration value, throw our management packs up on our web site and leave our customers to their own devices when it comes to support.  But that's not the HP approach.  While we'll continue to deliver basic management packs free of charge for SCOM and SCCM updates, we're confident that our customers who need more advanced functionality like automated deployment and virtual machine management expect more, because we've done our homework. You can learn more about this exciting new product at: www.hp.com/go/ICESystemCenter, or come visit us if you happen to be attending MMS!