Welcome back!
With introductions out of the way; let’s get on to the fun stuff, shall we?
File this one under “a new view into interoperability – the beginning of an HP & Cisco hybrid networking world.”
Back in December of 2009, Cisco Systems announced that it was expanding its data center business and getting into the server market with its own line of blade servers. As you might imagine, this came as quite a nasty shock to Hewlett Packard who had a pretty cozy relationship with Cisco in the enterprise data center space. Prior to that, a little known fact is that HP was Cisco’s single largest reseller of networking gear (HP was selling the stuff to their enterprise accounts).
The impact of Cisco’s entry into the server market is yet to be fully realized, however HP’s CEO Mark Hurd has already made a couple of organizational changes to become a stronger player in the networking space. The first change was to move ProCurve from it’s own division (at $1 Billion) to become a part of their much larger Technology Solutions Group (TSG) ($37.7 Billion FY07). The second change was to begin using their own networking products within their own data centers – basically the beginning of eating their own dog food, if you will. Recently, HP completed a data center consolidation project that replaced a Cisco designed network with a hybrid solution. Today, HP’s network core is still Cisco, but all of the edge ports in the data center are now ProCurve. Now, that was a significant move for HP!
On that subject, and if I may be permitted to smile with honor for a moment…we here at Versatile provided the ProCurve-Cisco interoperability training to HP’s own IT staff in all of their datacenters world-wide when they made the switch from a Cisco to ProCurve edge last year. It may not be as big a deal to some, however being chosen by HP to train their employees on their product to implement home grown switching products was a definite point of pride around here.
Back again soon.
Wilson
Just a guess, but you may have meant December 2008 instead of 2009.
Comment by ed petrovich — November 11, 2009 @ 2:01 pm
That I did Ed. Thanks for the correction.
Comment by wilsonsrouter — November 19, 2009 @ 4:48 pm
Hey Wilson so now what? HP purchased 3com, where do we go from here?
Comment by John — November 13, 2009 @ 6:38 pm
John, that’s a really interesting question and something I think a lot of people are wondering about as well. My first thought was that HP needed to fill out their networking portfolio with a high end core switch and now we know where they are going to get it.
It is interesting that they chose 3Com over someone like, say Brocade for example for any number of reasons. In fact you’ve given a great idea, to be continued…
Comment by wilsonsrouter — November 19, 2009 @ 4:48 pm