Making printing as mobile as business users

With the launch of the HP ePrint service App, iPhone users can now print emails, presentations, reports, travel documents and more to any networked enterprise printer. To help mitigate security risks, all print jobs are managed by HP ePrint Enterprise Administrative Server software, ensuring that data is kept within the company’s own network.

iPhone users can easily search a directory of available print locations and use their smartphone’s GPS functionality to navigate to HP ePrint Mobile Print Locations that include print and copy retail stores as well as hotels and airport lounges.

FedEx Office implemented the HP ePrint solution across its network of more than 1,800 locations nationwide last year, giving users of BlackBerry® smartphones – and now iPhone – access to ePrint through the world’s largest retail printing network.

“With these ePrint enhancements, iPhone users can now print documents directly from their devices to our stores using our FedEx Office Print & Go service,” said Brian Philips, president and chief executive officer, FedEx Office. “We are the only national print retailer to offer smartphone printing – making us the clear leader in the marketplace with our extensive portfolio of products and services.”

Many HP ePrint Mobile Print Locations, including Hilton Worldwide, are powered by the PrinterOn® network of public printers.

The HP ePrint service App is available for free from the App Store on iPhone or at www.itunes.com/appstore/.

Detailed information on HP ePrint Enterprise and HP ePrint Mobile Print Locations is available here.

Article abstracted from http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/110411a.html

Ready. Set. Converge

Ready. Set. Converge

For several years, IT has been evolving toward a more open, nimble and efficient infrastructure. Even so, virtually every enterprise has installed its share of short-sighted solutions. Project-based servers, single-application storage and systems siloed by lines of business are now becoming their own complications in terms of IT efficiency. It’s no longer feasible for organizations to find individual products to solve individual problems. The infrastructure of tomorrow is converged, and it requires a conscious decision today.

What is a converged infrastructure? In the most basic sense, it’s a truly service-centric—not system-centric—model of IT. The idea is to merge computer, storage and networks with facilities into a single environment. All resources and processes are controlled by a shared-services engine that provisions application workloads to instantly respond to business demands. As a result, service delivery is faster, repeatable, predictable and more efficient.

The converged infrastructure creates a foundation to gain more potential from top IT trends, such as cloud computing, green IT and virtualization. Rather than relying on inefficient, short-sighted, point solutions to accommodate changing business needs, the converged infrastructure is built to change along with your business. Convergence is less about making quick new purchases today and more about planning for the future. Following are five main characteristics of a truly converged infrastructure.

The inner workings of a converged infrastructure

Virtualized
Server virtualization is common, but the converged infrastructure of tomorrow virtualizes all resources in the data center: compute, storage, networking and power and cooling. This type of end-to-end virtualization gives you the freedom to move application environments anywhere, anytime. As a result, you can optimize every data center resource and respond to business requests faster and more effectively.

Resilient
The quest for a resilient infrastructure often results in IT sprawl for many organizations. Stacking on more servers might be the most obvious way to achieve resiliency, but it rarely achieves IT efficiency. A converged infrastructure pulls from a pool of shared resources. This lets you tune the right amount of resiliency to every application, whether you need fault tolerance or disaster recovery. By using your resources more efficiently, you can cut costs by avoiding underutilization.

Orchestrated
IT departments today focus too much energy on managing systems when they say they want to manage services. Processes that should be repeatable and predictable take too much time and pull people away from more valuable work.

In a converged infrastructure, the orchestration of all IT resources is based on policies. Administrators collaborate through a centralized management hub to define service templates and policies. Then other administrators can be more productive while adhering to preset rules. As a result, best practices are hardwired into the system, and the system naturally enforces governance and compliance—without repetitive, costly, error-prone human intervention.

Optimized
Many people link resource optimization to virtualization of individual resources. But a converged infrastructure can optimize for any workload, on any resource, anywhere. It can adapt to a wide variety requirements for performance and resiliency without the dangers of over-provisioning or under-provisioning. Most important, it optimizes automatically.

Modular
A converged infrastructure is based on many technologies that you’re already using, such as virtualization and blade technology. So it doesn’t require you to throw out what you have and start from scratch. Rather, it starts in your data center today, with your current investments, and takes advantage of other modular pieces that are based on an open, scalable architecture.

 

Article abstract from http://www8.hp.com/us/en/solutions/article_detail.html?compURI=tcm:183-235061&pageTitle=Ready.%20Set.%20Converge?404m=rt404mb,newcclltow1en