BANGALORE, INDIA: HP, who acquired 3Com recently, unveiled its 'edge-to-core networking portfolio' that will combine ProCurve and 3Com expertises.

HP cliams that the new network fabric is up to twice as fast with half the energy use, and at a 65 percent lower total cost of ownership.

Also Read: HP-3Com merger marks end of Cisco dominance

HP Networking will be led by Marius Haas, senior vice president and general manager, and is part of the enterprise servers, storage and networking business unit led by David Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager.

The portfolio is a cornerstone of the HP Converged Infrastructure strategy, which eliminates silos of servers, storage and networking to create virtual pools of resources designed to optimally run business services.

“Enterprises are clearly asking for more choice when looking at networking solutions,” said Mark Fabbi, vice president and distinguished analyst, Gartner Inc.

With the addition of the TippingPoint portfolio, HP has expanded the HP Secure Advantage product family to deliver proactive threat protection.

HP goes Cisco-free in its data centre
HP also announced that its internal data centre, now running entirely on HP Networking equipment, which integrates the 3Com portfolio, is experiencing faster information throughput and lower energy consumption.

The new data center, located in the Houston area, is one of six internal facilities running HP's worldwide business operations. It currently includes 34 3Com core routing devices, more than 300 HP ProCurve switches and four TippingPoint intrusion detection and protection devices.

Improvements within the data center include the core router throughput performance of the 3Com product, which exceeds 2.1 billion packets of data per second, versus less than one billion for the current market leader's fastest data centre product.

Taking a dig at Cisco, HP claims that 3Com also has full multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) in all chassis, while competitive offerings do not.

"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, Infrastructure, Global Information Technology Organization, HP. "We're Cisco-free in this data center and have a plan to extend this freedom across all of our internal IT data centres next year."

HP began construction of the new data centre in February 2009 and finished the network build out last month. The data centre contains a 25,000-square-foot cell that runs production applications, and a second cell of the same size is near completion. The building also can be expanded by two additional 25,000-square-foot cells.

The number and type of layer-three device models installed are as follows:
-- 20 x H3C S9505-E switches -- deployed as distribution routers in HP data centers
-- 5 x H3C S5820X switches -- deployed primarily for backup networks
-- 4 x H3C 12508 switches -- deployed as core routers for the data center
-- 5 x H3C SR8808 routers -- deployed as backbone routers within the data center
-- 4 x TippingPoint 5100N intrusion protection systems -- deployed between the core and distribution layers