HP ousts FCoE module, security solutions

BANGALORE, INDIA: The enterprise networking industry that is touted to be $1.7 billion in revenues, growing at 15 percent (CAGR), in another year is set to see a major flip-flop with HP's entry challenging the market leader Cisco.

In one of HP's first announcements after the much touted 3Com acquisition a month ago, which raised the former's data centre credentials, the company today brought in a range of networking and security solutions.

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

HP Networking, which brings HP's ProCurve, H3C and 3Com under one unit, thus looks at stregthening its converged data centre networking portfolio in order to build an end-to-end 'Cisco-free' data centre. 

Subhodeep Bhattacharya, country manager, India, HP Networking, said that 3Com's acquisition and now with the launch of these products HP is making an effort to 'meet eye-to-eye' with the enterprise networking market leader Cisco.

"Today with cloud and virtualization, consumers are looking up to converged data centre fabric, of server, storage and networking. They want end-to-end, cost effective networking solutions for data centres," he added.

Networking solutions

HP brings in a new fibre channel over Ethernet (FCoE) module for its A5820 data centre switch (H3C S5820x).

“Traditional data centre networks are rigid, complex and expensive. As such, they are unable to keep pace with the increasing use of server virtualization and rapid changes in business demands”, added Bhattacharya. “HP FCoE is an emerging technology that reduces network complexity, as well as costs, while complementing traditional fibre channel and iSCSI storage connectivity solutions”, he added

The FCoE module for the HP A5820 data centre switch connects virtual and physical servers to Ethernet and storage networks.

The new HP A5820 FCoE solution complements the recently introduced HP Virtual Connect FlexFabric module for BladeSystem.

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The company claims that HP Virtual Connect module enables clients to reduce up to 95 percent of network equipment by eliminating the need for multiple interconnects. It also lowers power and cooling costs up to 40 percent per year while dramatically simplifying change management.

Security Solutions

FlexFabric: HP's secure data centre networking fabric for a converged infrastructure. The company claims that with this solution companies can not only virtually allot storage or resources to data centres, but also to a particular department, which might need more bandwidth or other resources.

TippingPoint Secure Virtualization Framework (SVF): A suite of products designed to prevent network threats from impacting virtualized environments.

It is the first product introduced under the SVF, which extends TippingPoint security protection from physical to virtual networks by routing it through an HP TippingPoint N-Platform Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) appliance.

vController: This prevents security attacks by inspecting all VM traffic as it moves through  network — either between VMs or from VMs to traditional servers.

HP TippingPoint Reputation Digital Vaccine service (Rep DV): It ensures that customer-deployed IPS solutions have the most current and accurate list of malicious or suspicious websites and blocks traffic to or from these sites automatically.

HP TippingPoint S-series: Are solutions that further extend network security from local area networks to the core of the data centre for both physical and virtual domains.