HP Launches FlexNetwork Solutions

HP has introduced solutions based on the new HP FlexNetwork architecture, including the HP A-series 10500 campus core switch, which delivers industry-leading throughput, latency and performance for the delivery of media-rich applications.

A new HP FlexManagement solution converges physical and virtual network management in a single pane of glass, and a new virtual- and cloud-optimized network intrusion prevention system (IPS) increases security in data centers.

These solutions are based on the HP FlexNetwork architecture, the industry’s only unified architecture for the data center, campus and branch enabling enterprises to fully harness the power of media-rich content, virtualization, mobility and cloud computing.

A core component of the HP Converged Infrastructure, the HP FlexNetwork architecture unifies network silos by ensuring industry-standard protocols are implemented consistently across all networked devices throughout an enterprise. As a result, clients are able to simplify and speed service delivery across the data center, campus and branch, driving increased agility and innovation.

“Customers are looking for vendors driving a systemic change in networking to eliminate complexity, improve agility and increase performance,” said Marius Haas, senior vice president and general manager, Networking, HP. “HP’s new modular campus switches outperform Cisco’s in-class products head-to-head in each category, while HP’s single-pane-of-glass management tool alone does what it takes Cisco 30 different tools to do.”

The campus switch segment, the largest segment of the worldwide Ethernet switch market, is forecast to reach $13.7 billion in 2011, growing from $12 billion in 2010. Clients have long required advancement in campus architectures with fewer network tiers, lower latency and significantly higher throughput to deliver on the expanding amount of multimedia content.

Faced with IT sprawl, the complexity of multitier deployments and increasing demand for virtualization, clients can turn to the HP FlexNetwork architecture to simplify their networks and prepare their organizations for demanding, service-oriented computing models such as cloud, mobile computing and virtualization.

While Cisco can require 30 separate management tools for data center, campus and branch networks, HP delivers single-pane-of-glass management with the HP Intelligent Management Center (IMC) across all the modular building blocks of the HP FlexNetwork architecture.

The new HP IMC version 5 manages the entire HP Networking portfolio as well as more than 2,600 network devices from over 35 vendors, more than 1,000 of those devices are from Cisco.

HP IMC helps clients mitigate the risk of migration from proprietary legacy networks to the open, standards-based HP FlexNetwork architecture.

HP IMC version 5 provides a unified view into the virtual and physical data center network to accelerate service delivery, simplify operations and boost network availability. It automatically discovers virtual machines, virtual switches and their relationship to the physical network, overcoming the challenges of administrating increasingly virtualized service-oriented data centers.

An upcoming version of HP IMC is planned to add automatic synchronization of network connectivity information with HP Virtual Connect technology for server blades and further automate the process of creating a server profile, moving a step closer to one-button cloud provisioning.

 “To meet network requirements of our new Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Cloud Centers, we needed a single, scalable networking architecture that would be easy to manage across both physical and virtual domains,” said Henry Fastert, chief technologist, SHI International, a $3 billion global provider of information technology and services.

 “HP IMC provides us with network management and advanced automation capabilities from a single platform that allows simple and rapid service orchestration.”