HP Cisco Utility Computing - Yenra

HP Expands Collaboration with Cisco Systems for Utility Computing Solutions

HP expanded its collaboration with Cisco Systems on the HP Utility Data Center (HP UDC) to provide enterprise and service provider customers with an HP UDC solution optimized for Cisco networking components.

Specifically, HP and Cisco have agreed to joint engineering development activities and interoperability testing to integrate Cisco components into the HP UDC architecture, helping to ensure feature and benefits optimization for customers. Included in the UDC architecture, interoperating with HP Utility Controller software, are Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series switches, PIX 515 Series firewalls and 2950 routers.

Through their joint efforts, HP and Cisco also will enable new products and features to be incorporated into the HP UDC in an accelerated, tightly integrated fashion.

Expansion of Cisco's support for the HP UDC is the latest in a series of successes in support of HP's adaptive infrastructure initiative, which allows customers to quickly and efficiently adapt their IT infrastructures to changing conditions in the market and customer demand.

"Networking is critical to delivering value in a virtualized environment," said Tom Kucharvy, president, Summit Strategies. "This partnership will benefit both companies and further establish HP's UDC in the market."

The combined strength of the market-leading HP UDC and Cisco Systems' leading networking platforms enables customers to quickly and efficiently optimize their IT infrastructures. The two companies also will collaborate on research and development, joint marketing, sales and cooperative support of the HP UDC.

"We are pleased to partner with HP in bringing a virtualized data center to market that is enhanced specifically to run our components," said Eugene Lee, vice president, Worldwide Enterprise Marketing, Cisco. "The combination of our networking solutions and HP's UDC will be a powerful and compelling offering to our mutual customers."

HP is the only vendor with true utility computing solutions on the market today. With the HP UDC, enterprises can double their data center efficiency (for example, to 60 percent from 30 percent); realize a reduction in total cost of ownership by accessing capacity as they need it, when they need it; and move entire systems into applications and drag-and-drop resources on the fly. Moreover, all system changes are done outside of the computer room; not a single wire or server is touched.

"Today's news demonstrates that HP has the better utility computing partner value proposition over any competitor," said Nick van der Zweep, director of Utility Computing, HP Enterprise Systems Group. "Our milestones serve as proof of the success of our utility computing and adaptive infrastructure strategy to provide customers with an agile IT infrastructure that is right for their businesses and that delivers true return on IT investment."

Additionally, HP has sold more than 218,000 licenses of key technologies enabling customers to more effectively run and adapt their infrastructures according to their particular business requirements.

This includes more than 10,000 on-demand server licenses delivering true usage-based utility computing. The extended virtualization capabilities of HP Workload Manager software have improved the integration of clustering, partitioning, workload management and pay-as-you-go offerings, allowing customers to utilize utility computing capabilities. HP customers have already purchased more than 70,000 licenses for HP Serviceguard clustering and more than 65,000 licenses for HP workload management software.

HP also announced further milestones and successes for its utility computing and adaptive infrastructure initiatives:

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