HP and VMware plan further product integration

HP and VMware plan to develop and market a range of intrusion prevention security products, in a collaboration that builds on existing work.

The hardware maker and virtualisation company said on Tuesday that they aim to tailor HP's TippingPoint Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) range of products to fit VMware's virtualisation security vShield and management vCloud Director packages.

This expanded relationship is designed to deliver additional innovative security technology for a converged infrastructure.

– Alan Kessler, HP

The companies said the integration will allow security management to extend across physical and virtual IT stacks, and allow IT professionals to automate "the processes of scanning, identifying threats and blocking attacks" across these areas, HP said in a statement.

"Building upon HP's global strategic alliance with VMware, this expanded relationship is designed to deliver additional innovative security technology for a converged infrastructure," said Alan Kessler, general manager of HP's security products organisation, in a statement on Tuesday. "With the growth of virtualisation and cloud computing, security requirements have never been more complex and critical to our clients."

HP and VMware have collaborated for eight years on product integration. Prior to Tuesday's announcement, TippingPoint's IPS vController product used VMware's VMsafe application processing interface (API) to allow the security product to integrate into VMware virtualised environments.

In 2009 the companies unveiled management tools to boost coherence between HP physical and VMware virtual environments. In 2008 HP and VMware announced that HP would ship 10 models of its top-tier ProLiant server range with embedded ESX 3i hypervisors.

Malicious traffic

TippingPoint IPS uses network hardware to block malicious traffic and prioritise data packets for certain applications. IPS depends on an application-specific integrated circuit (Asic)-based security system that uses parallel processing to check thousands of packets simultaneously for malicious data, with a maximum end-to-end latency of 84 microseconds per packet, according to an HP datasheet.

The vShield security suite is designed for applications built on top of VMware's ESX and ESXi hypervisors. vCloud Director is a VMware tool to build multi-tenant private clouds by running a virtual datacentre on top of pooled hardware infrastructure, designed to work in tandem with VMware's vSphere hypervisor and management suite.

Additionally, the companies will jointly market a hardware and software product that allows administrators to set dynamic security policies for virtualised environments. The product, called the HP TippingPoint IPS vController and VMware vShield solution, will combine HP's TippingPoint virtualisation security vController with VMware's vShield App and Edge protection.

The HP TippingPoint IPS vController and VMware vShield product, which will available on Tuesday, will be demonstrated at the RSA Conference 2011, HP said in a statement. Pricing was not available at the time of writing.