HP Expands server offering to help reduce telephony, IT network costs

Malta Independent Sunday, 12 July 2009, 00:00 Last update: about 14 years ago

HP has expanded its telecom hardware portfolio with powerful, carrier-grade versions of the company's most advanced enterprise servers and storage products.

The new offerings provide telecom companies with the reliability set by NEBS requirements, as well as the lower cost and flexibility of industry-standard 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.

"Customers are looking for flexible, open platforms that deliver greater speed, more agility and lower costs," said Chuck Smith, vice president, BladeSystem Business Development, HP. "With expertise in both telecom and IT, HP provides a family of servers that combines the best of both worlds: the cost-effectiveness of proven IT platforms plus the reliability, performance and ETSI/ NEBS Level 3 certification of carrier-grade platforms."

Using the most advanced Intel® processors, both the HP BladeSystem and the HP ProLiant platforms double the performance of their predecessors and provide greater energy efficiency.

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.

In addition to blade and rack-mount servers, HP offers a large portfolio of telecom software, services and integrated solutions to the world's 200 major service providers and network equipment suppliers.

The new additions to HP's carrier-grade portfolio include the HP ProLiant DL380 G6 server, which doubles performance over previous versions of the rack-mount server. Now available in a carrier-grade version, the HP ProLiant DL380 G6 includes two 2.53-GHz Intel quad-core processors.

Also in the new portfolio is the HP StorageWorks MSA2000fc G2 and MSA2000sa G2, providing carrier-grade storage arrays that deliver support for high-availability and data protection capabilities through features such as snapshots for point-in-time copies of data.

The HP Integrity BL860c, meanwhile, is a carrier-grade server blade that provides extreme scalability and high performance for applications such as text messaging. The server blade is designed for the HP c7000-cg enclosure, while the HP ProLiant BL460c G6 is another carrier-grade server blade delivering performance twice as fast as previous versions, while energy efficiency has also been enhanced significantly.