Hewlett-Packard: 8 Weapons 3Com Brings to the HP-Cisco Brawl

HP’s massive $2.7 billion pick-up of 3Com will certainly turn the heat up on the company’s growing rivalry with Cisco. Channel Insider takes a look at which new capabilities added by 3Com will best help HP go toe-to-toe with Cisco.

3Com Open Network Program

HP has made it clear that the biggest differentiator it has developed in its battle against the Cisco networking juggernaut is a product base built on an open architecture. 3Com complements this strategy with its 3Com Open Network Program, through which the company has worked to develop relationships with ISVs, service providers, system integrators, consultants and customers to improve interoperability and open development in the networking environment.

Data Center Core Switch S12500

The coup de grace of the 3Com acquisition will be the added capability of core and aggregation switching, a needed complement to flesh out HP’s offering beyond the edge into the core. At the heart of this is the young H3C switch portfolio, including the flagship H3C S1250, doubles the performance of Cisco’s Nexus 7000 and eats up half the power of this rival.

Flex Chassis SwitchS5800

Similarly, HP is paying big bucks for the top-of-rack switching capabilities offered by 3Com, as evidenced by the H3C S5800, a flex-chassis switch that can be used as a modular chassis as well as a fixed-form-factor stackable switch.

MSR Family

Though ProCurve has helped HP beat up on Cisco at the edge within the SMB, HP’s still weak when it comes to enterprise edge routing. 3Com helps remedy the situation with the MSR family of routers, many of which will help HP take on Cisco’s ISR series.

Intelligent Management Center

HP’s existing Business Technology Optimization (BTO) suite will gain added firepower with the addition of Intelligent Management Center. An enterprise-class management system that scale to handle a high-density infrastructure, IMC is built on service-oriented architecture and can help enterprise customers consolidate network management within the largest of environments.

TippingPoint

While HP certainly bolstered its security practice with the 2007 acquisition of SPI Dynamics, it was still lacking strength in the area of network security. A venerable player in the IPS/IDS field, TippingPoint offers HP options to not only sell stand alone intrusion detection, but also build it into next generation networking equipment, a strategy that 3Com was already spinning up with H3C.

3Com VoIP

While there’s certainly some overlap with HP’s Halo, 3Com’s VoIP portfolio offers a more mature technology portfolio on which the folks in Palo Alto can draw upon if they get the integration right. Overall, this will be crucial in strengthening HP’s attack on Cisco’s UCC market share.

H3C S7506E

One of the big boons of the H3C portfolio in general is its energy efficiency. The S7506E is the greenest of the bunch, according to a recent report from independent performance testing firm Miercom. Miercom found that this switch has an annual operating cost that runs 24 percent lower than industry average.

HP ProCurve's BattlePlan

Paul Congdon is chief technology officer (CTO) at ProCurve, the division of HP that manufactures switches, routers and other networking products. He talked to Computing about how network virtualisation can improve the performance and manageability of virtual servers in the datacentre.

Analyst research suggests Ethernet switch sales are down 24 per cent year on year - how can ProCurve get companies buying again?

The market has been down overall, but we have had enormous success with wireless, seeing 112 per cent growth even though the market was declining by 20 per cent overall. We are closing the gap on Cisco in sales of 10Gbit/s Ethernet equipment as well.




Many organisations still find it difficult to obtain cash or get a loan, while ProCurve has been traditionally strong in the public and education sector, and in the US at least government cutbacks have presented a challenge – public sector money is not as available as it used to be. We are offering various incentives within the [reseller] channel, trade-in programmes and initiatives around lead generation. There are no heavy discounts, but the margins have not changed much.

What new technology will tempt firms into upgrading their existing network infrastructure?

Embedding security in switches is an ongoing process. One of those things with the whole Moore’s Law process is the density of silicon and the amount of space within chipsets to add programmable functions to switches. The other is network virtualisation, where we can create virtual ports inside a switch. You might have 24 physical Ethernet ports, but another 200 virtual ports, for example.

What will network virtualisation do?

There are a couple of approaches to the technology being proposed to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), one backed by HP ProCurve, and another by Cisco. The driving force here is that a virtual server has a piece of network infrastructure, a virtual switch, embedded in its software, which could actually be moved into hardware to improve virtual server performance and manageability.

The big questions are what should the virtual switch do, how much number crunching should it implement, and where should it reside? Network managers generally like to configure devices to make them behave the way they want them to, either within virtual software on the server, or at the edge of the network. Either the servers need to take on new functions, such as firewalls, or that stuff has to be put out on the network where the switches can do it for them.

What would you recommend as the best approach?

HP ProCurve proposes choice and flexibility, a way to configure virtual software so it can direct traffic out onto the edge of the network rather than have every feature known to mankind embedded within software that will ultimately run on a network interface card (NIC) with input/output (I/O) virtualisation capabilities.

The difference here could be NICs that cost $500 rather than $5, so we are very interested in finding a way that uses the capabilities in existing switches so the upgrade path is less disruptive. We could add a lot of that software into a switch without the capital cost of the NIC, it just comes down to a question of complexity and management – configuring firewall rules between new virtual LANs (VLANs) for example, could be done on one switch or every switch in the system, and that could create management problems for some people. There is trade off between performance and functionality and customers should be able to choose between the two rather than be limited to what is put inside NICs.

What are the potential benefits of network virtualisation for the IT manager?

Performance and manageability are foremost, but it is also ease of migration. You could import a base set of these capabilities into a switch, for example, without requiring a hardware upgrade, and therefore experiment without taking on capital costs right away. There are some open-source solutions available now – I wrote some of the code myself.

Where will demand for this sort of network virtualisation come from?

Datacentres will be the big beneficiaries, but also imagine how that extends to wireless environments. If you can embed a wireless controller in an Ethernet switch, you can use virtual ports to represent wireless users, then terminate virtual private network (VPN) connections on virtual ports [without taking up physical ports on the switch].

HP ProCurve Networking

Lifted HP earnings

Notebooks and servers continue to lift HP earnings

Emerging nations are buying notebooks by the bundle, and Hewlett-Packard is reaping the benefits.

HP reported its fourth-quarter earnings Monday, and revenues were up across its business units, but the PC business was again the star. Revenue for the Personal Systems Group, which sells desktops and notebook PCs, was up 30 percent from the same quarter a year ago to $10.1 billion. It's the first time the business unit has crossed the $10 billion threshold. Shipments of PCs rose about one-third in the last year.

But HP is claiming success for its revenue and sales growth all for itself. Demand for Microsoft Windows Vista had nothing to do with the high growth numbers in PCs this year, said HP CEO Mark Hurd. There was "never a Vista moment at any time over the past year," he said on a media conference call. "There was no Vista hold back, so there was no Vista positive inflection point."

Overall, HP reported $28.3 billion in revenue, an increase of 15 percent from the same quarter a year ago, and earnings of 81 cents per share. The company also reported that the board of directors had approved $8 billion to be used for future share repurchases.

The world's No. 1 PC maker has turned in a string of highly successful quarters since surpassing rival Dell in market share more than a year ago. HP has taken advantage of the explosion of first-time PC buyers in emerging nations like Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Those regions now account for 9 percent of the company's revenue. On the earnings conference call, Hurd noted that HP now sells its products in 400 Chinese cities, with more planned in the future.

Blade servers also saw high growth, with an increase of 78 percent in revenue in the last year. The Imaging and Printing Group, the business unit that sells cameras and printing hardware, saw the weakest growth, turning in flat profits and 4 percent growth to $7.6 billion in the last year. Notably, consumer hardware sales declined 5 percent. Last week, HP announced it is changing its camera business model and wants to partner with someone else to manufacture its cameras.