The foundation for HP's unified infrastructure management strategy is Systems Insight Manager, which provides hardware-level management for HP ProLiant, Integrity and HP 9000 servers; HP BladeSystems; and HP StorageWorks MSA, EVA, and XP storage arrays.

Rich Escott, director of storage management software, said Systems Insights Manager 5.0 will ship in about a month and will link the company's server management and storage management under one management interface.

"The talk for a lot of time had been how do you get to a single pane of glass," Escott said. "What we see is you have a lot of companies that have one screen with a lot of windows, but that's not effectively integrated from a workflow standpoint or security standpoint."

Joe Clabby, a research analyst at Summit Strategies Inc. in St. Louis., said the AppIQ acquisition is a "great leap forward" in systems management for HP.

"HP already had (the) ability to discover and monitor and manage systems in a (manual way). Now they can automate that management," Clabby said. "This really rounds out HP's storage management product line."