HP's 'intelligent' centre virtualises network

BANGALORE, INDIA: Technology major Hewlett-Packard Networking recently announced Intelligent Management Centre (IMC). The IMC, a multi-vendor network management platform, allows customers to orchestrate and virtualise network bandwidth and deliver bandwidth as a service.

"We have a server, which has processors, storage, which has disk and network, which has bandwidth. What normally gets virtualised today are server and their processing power and to some extent disk space utilisation. However, from virtualisation and bandwidth perspectives, they were not orchestrated or virtualised," says Amol Mitra, director, product marketing and business planning, HP Networking, Asia Pacific and Japan.

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“The ability to get bandwidth efficiently from network is what we are doing with IMC. HP's Intelligent Management Centre can now manage network bandwidth. If unused network is available somewhere in your network, you can find it and use it for other applications and need not buy more network bandwidth," he added.

HP has already deployed IMC in HP, and says that it is getting good response from the market for this particular product, especially for two reasons.

"Plain network virtualisation was never done in the past. Moreover, now you have a single pane of glass to manage server, storage, network and virtualisation, which also is very important for the data centre, but was never done. There are only a few companies in the market who can do that. Since we have control points, servers and networking under one roof, we can build the structure,” he added.

He also said similar to how companies can buy processing power with credit cards from data centres, they can also buy bandwidth in future.

"In future we will have an application that sits on mobile phones, with which you can manage network, remotely. We can support about 6,000 device, from about 150 manufacturers," he added.

The company, which had also announced a range of other networking products during the same event, feels that with the kind of scale and breadth of the products announced, it can compete with anyone in the market.

"Regardless of who the competitor is, whether it is Cisco, Brocade, or Juniper, our value preposition is unique."