HP unveiled an IT-infrastructure management system for its ProLiant and BladeSystem servers Wednesday, whose design takes a lot from the simplicity of tools built for consumers.

While HP designed OneView specifically for IT admins to manage particular HP sever families, it is based on RESTful APIs, which means admins can program it to manage IT gear made by other vendors.

That is according to Gary Thome, VP and chief engineer for HP BladeSystem. OneView “user interface is actually built on a set of APIs,” he said, adding that extending its management capabilities to non-HP gear would be quiet simple for a typical IT manager.

OneView is meant to replace Insight Control, HP's current IT management software for its servers. The company expects customers who already use Insight to migrate to the new software very quickly.

While made primarily to manage compute and storage capacity, OneView has some data center infrastructure management (DCIM) features as well. It provides a visualization of the data center that includes hot spots.

The temperature data “comes from the BladeSystem and the servers themselves,” Thome said. Because it knows where in the rack each server is, it can build a 3D temperature map of the data center floor.

OneView's ability to keep track of device location gives it another DCIM capability: capacity management. Again, the DCIM features are limited to HP hardware, however.

The solution's core functionality, however, is focused on the bread-and-butter of IT infrastructure management: things like adding, removing and troubleshooting servers, configuring network or moving workloads between servers. In an attempt to make these tasks simpler for customers, HP surveyed about 150 of them and made some interesting conclusions.

Each of the tasks, regardless of what it is specifically, involves five basic steps, Thome said. Instead of taking the approach other existing management tools take – focusing on managing devices – HP focused on managing those steps.

The steps are: decide what you are doing, decide which device you are doing it with, identify what other devices may be affected, do the activity, monitor progress. Each of the steps usually involves multiple people in the organization, Thome explained, so the idea was to unify what all those people do.

“We created several new features in OneView that help make each one of those steps go much much faster,” he said.

A dashboard view displays the status of every device being managed and capacity of the infrastructure overall. Instead of tree navigation, OneView has robust search capabilities.

“If you wanna navigate the web, how do you do it? You do a search to find anything you want,” Thome said. “Traditional methods, such as tree navigation, just don't scale.”

For an instantaneous understanding of how each device affects others, the software generates a map-like view of the relationships between different pieces of equipment.

OneView allows experts in the organization to create a template for each activity – provisioning a new BladeSystem can be one – specifying each step in the process for technicians to follow.

Finally, the software generates a real-time activity feed, which brings all activities and alerts in one place.