HP today introduced technology that allows enterprises to deliver policy-based orchestration across applications, networks and users, eliminating manual configuration and enabling application deployment in minutes.

HP is collaborating with F5, a provider of Application Delivery Networking (ADN), to offer solutions that converge application and network orchestration.

The new solutions provide single-pane-of-glass management through HP Intelligent Management Center and offer clients the ability to meet the speed and agility requirements of the cloud era.

The new solutions are based on the integration of HP Virtual Application Networks technology, which virtualizes networks and automates configuration, and F5 ADN technology, which does the same for application configuration.

Deploying applications in a typical data center takes months of manual, device-by-device configuration across several layers of network infrastructure. Similarly, applications require weeks of configuring details, such as user connection profiles from both company and employee-owned devices. A typical enterprise data-center network may require more than 250,000 manual command line entries for network implementation, and more than 100,000 application configuration steps through manual processes that are time-consuming and error-prone.

As the industry increasingly moves to cloud and other dynamic computing environments, manual command line network and application configuration processes are quickly becoming obsolete.

“IT needs to move at the speed of the organization but legacy application, network and user configuration practices are barriers to achieving this necessary agility,” said Bethany Mayer, senior vice president and general manager, Networking, HP. “Through HP Virtual Application Networks and our collaboration with F5, clients will be able to virtualize and automate the entire configuration process—from application to network to user—based on policy-driven management, enabling them to deploy applications to users in minutes, not weeks or months.”

HP Virtual Application Networks provide organizations with a virtualized and comprehensive view of a network, and enable them to transform a rigid physical enterprise network into a programmable, multitenant and application-aware virtual network.

Leveraging software-defined networking technologies such as OpenFlow, HP Virtual Application Networks use templates to characterize application-delivery requirements and deliver an automated, policy-driven approach to network configuration.

F5’s portfolio of ADN solutions enables customers to manage the delivery of applications across their entire IT infrastructure. This allows customers to scale and adapt to business needs on demand, and ensures applications stay secure, fast and available. F5 ADN solutions create a dynamic infrastructure that maximizes the performance and availability of physical and virtual machines to manage application delivery across multiple devices.

HP and F5 are delivering tested and validated solutions for deploying Microsoft® Exchange 2010, server virtualization and disaster recovery across the enterprise in minutes, while increasing the performance of virtual machine mobility tenfold.

The benefits enable enterprises to:

- Reduce download time for users, decrease spam by 70 percent and increase administrator efficiency up to 33 percent while ensuring security across the network for Microsoft Exchange 2010.

- Free up to 40 percent of server resources and increase virtual machine density by 60 percent, while accelerating application performance up to three times for server virtualization.

- Reduce the time to move a virtual machine between data centers for disaster recovery from 20 minutes to 38 seconds.

With up to 60 percent of enterprises unsure of the devices being connected to their networks, HP and F5 are simplifying enterprise bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiatives by delivering solutions that combine user and device authentication and application access control.

The new HP BYOD solution works with F5 ADN technology to unify the on-boarding, provisioning and monitoring of user devices on the corporate network with application access control across the enterprise via a single management platform.