The networking industry in general has been undergoing a period of transition in 2011, with even more likely to come in 2012 but 2011 was still a good year for HP’s Networking division and the outlook for 2012 is even brighter.
HP Networking has been undergoing a period of transition in recent years. HP acquired networking vendor 3Com for $2.7 Billion in 2010 and worked hard to integrate those assets with the HP Procurve lineup. According to Saar Gillai, HP Networking’s CTO, the integration of 3Com is now complete.
“We’re starting to see some interesting transitions in terms of the data center turning into a fabric and we’re seeing mobility becoming even more important,” Gillai told EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet. “There is also an upgrade cycle that hasn’t happened in a long time and people have fairly old equipment in the campus, so it’s the beginning of a pretty big transition for networking.”
The move towards the data center as fabric is an interesting transition with broad implications. Data centers of the last decade were mostly about core connectivity. Now, that is transitioning to a cloud architecture where the network is even more fundamental for application delivery.
“There is also now a stronger emphasis on multi-path concurrent bandwidth and that’s different from the things that historically happened on campus networks,” Gillai said. “Concepts like spanning tree won’t work moving forward as new architectures require thousands of compute nodes and people are looking to have full cross-network bandwidth at all times.”
Read the full story at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet:
HP Networking Set on 2012 Market Leadership
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist
