HP targets service providers
HP today expanded its telecoms hardware portfolio with carrier-grade versions of the company’s most advanced enterprise servers and storage products.
Targeted at service providers and network equipment suppliers, the products include the HP BladeSystem Carrier-Grade (CG) platform, the HP ProLiant carrier-grade rack-mount server and the HP carrier-grade storage array.
“The world is changing, and customers require infrastructure that can change with them,” said Andrew McNiven, Industry Standard Server Product Manager, HP South Africa. “HP’s expertise in both telecom and IT has allowed us to create a flexible, open platform that offers greater speed and more agility at a lower cost.”
The two HP carrier-grade platforms support a variety of operating environments, including Windows, Linux, HP-UX, OpenVMS and Solaris from Sun Microsystems. By joint agreement, HP will distribute and provide full software support for Sun Solaris 10 on HP ProLiant and HP BladeSystem platforms.
Oracle, a leader in communications software, is enabling communications service providers to scale services profitably on the latest generation of HP BladeSystem servers.
“The performance and scalability of the Oracle Communications software running on HP BladeSystem servers is an ideal blend for helping service providers increase monetisation speed while maintaining control,” said Indu Kodukula, vice president, Service Delivery Products, Oracle. “The HP BladeSystem infrastructure reduced our engineering and integration costs, enabling our customers to scale immediately with low operating costs.”
The new additions to HP’s carrier-grade portfolio include the following:
• HP ProLiant DL380 G6 server
• HP StorageWorks MSA2000fc G2 and MSA2000sa G2 carrier-grade storage
• HP Integrity BL860c carrier-grade server blade
• HP ProLiant BL460c G6 carrier-grade server blade
HP also announced enablement of OpenSAF and OpenHPI on HP BladeSystem Carrier-Grade and HP ProLiant Carrier-Grade rack-mount platforms. Both OpenSAF and OpenHPI are open source implementations of Service Availability Forum (SA Forum) specifications. HP is a founding member and major contributor to OpenSAF.
