Hewlett Packard made an announcement on Tuesday signaling the introduction of new services to customers using important business applications running on virtualized, x86 based hardware.

Maloy also added that the growing confidence of customers in virtualization has seen it replace the UNIX systems for important applications. Although this is an economical alternative, it also increases the difficulty by creating more interdependence among servers, networks and storage systems.

Critical Advantage is clearly designed to deal with this problem. A team of engineers is provided to customers. This also includes the presence of a named account manager in the team. They work from one of HP’s Global Mission Critical Solution Centers.

HP’s level-2 and level-3 engineers function from The GMCSC. They are their smartest service staff who is trained to deal with these large, complex systems. Customers signing up with Critical Advantage will be provided with advice on optimizing their virtual environments and undertaking annual services like capacity analysis or security review. This will help reduce complications in the system.

Although customers can obtain a similar service from Critical Service, the top level systems support, they are required to buy hardware support for their HP gear as part of the deal.

In the industry, the purchase of high end hardware for availing access to level 2 and level 3 engineers for proactive consulting increases the overall value of the contracts. Maloy reiterated that Critical Advantage is a more flexible option as customers do not have to buy any hardware support to avail of these dedicated engineering services. However, they might have to buy some hardware support for select systems, but this is far less in comparison. This can also be done on a priority basis, he added.

The fall of a system in the virtue natural world is very different to the ‘lights out’ in the UNIX system, ordered Maloy. These do not work on the utmost ends. The performance slowdowns are minimum, which reduces the need for high end hardware services on everything, he added. This is a desirable advantage for many customers.

The pricing for the Critical Advantage system has not yet been decided by HP. There has also been no information provided on what hardware would be necessary for these services. There is some information available on the HP website, which is most likely to be updated on Tuesday.

This is a rare occasion when HP has chosen to add a new level to its Mission Critical Services division. Maloy reminded that the last time such an action was taken was many years ago. This definitely points to new developments in the company. The present levels consist of Mission Critical Partnership, which deals with designing IT architecture; along with engineering services and hardware support from Critical Service and entry level support from Proactive24.