Just months after its 3Com acquisition, Hewlett-Packard made an announcement Monday aimed at Cisco Systems. HP said its new Cisco-free internal data center is seeing faster information throughput and lower energy consumption running entirely on HP networking equipment.
Located in Houston, the new data center is one of six internal facilities running HP’s worldwide business operations. The new center includes 34 3Com core routing devices, more than 300 HP ProCurve switches, and four TippingPoint intrusion-detection and protection devices.
“This networking technology provides a true competitive choice in a space that has needed more choices for almost two decades,” said Randy Mott, executive vice president and chief information officer at HP. “These new products, along with HP’s Converged Infrastructure portfolio, are something every CIO should be taking advantage of.”
Assaulting Cisco
Mott’s comments are a direct assault on Cisco. The new HP Networking portfolio, which integrates 3Com’s portfolio, paves the way for twice the port and capacity density and a 50 percent reduction in power consumption from previous solutions. Using an architecture built on open standards, HP said its global IT organization worked with HP Networking teams to redesign the architecture with new products.
“We’re not locked into proprietary protocols that many in the IT industry are familiar with, and this gives us more flexibility to change as our business grows,” said Ken Gray, vice president of infrastructure at HP. “We’re Cisco-free in this data center and have a plan to extend this freedom across all of our internal IT data centers next year.”
Gray’s war-like comment — and its validity — may concern Cisco. Zeus Kerravala, a vice president at the Yankee Group, said 3Com’s data portfolio is strong and the majority of the lineup has been built out over the past couple of years with a differentiating philosophy of openness.
“While a lot of the…