HP boasts its SDN fabric cuts provisioning down from months to minutes
Hewlett-Packard is stepping up its datacenter game with a new suite of solutions for software-defined networking.
See also: HP launches Project Moonshot, powered with Intel's Atom at first | Servers, datacenters to see same upheaval as PC industry
Built on its FlexNetwork converged networking architecture, HP boasts that it can offer up to two times greater scalability with "75 percent less complexity" compared to other networking fabrics on the market.
Furthermore, HP asserted that its datacenter fabric will reduce provisioning time frames all the way down from months to just mere minutes.
HP's portfolio of SDN services being introduced today is quite substantial, with a number of different products aimed to answer issues from dealing with legacy infrastructures to simplifying operations.
For example, the HP Virtualized Services Router is designed to cut back datacenter footprints by delivering services on a virtual machine, which should eliminate "unnecessary hardware."
Additionally, the HP HSR 6800 Router Series aims to simplify network service delivery by consolidating routing, firewall, switching and security onto one device that supports thousands of users.
It's a busy time in this space, as many tech giants are turning away from their old staple products (notably PCs) toward building up their datacenter businesses — especially through open source technology (see: Hadoop) and software-defined datacenters.
For example, Dell recently introduced its own new software-defined networking fabric for deployments of converged, virtualized and private cloud environments.
That particular SDN fabric supports networking virtualization overlays using hypervisors from the likes of Microsoft, VMware and OpenStack while also supporting programmatic interfaces such as Telnet/CLI, TCL, REST, SNMP, Perl and Python scripting.
HP's suite of SDN offerings will be rolling out over the course of the year. Only the HSR 6800 Router Series is available worldwide now, which holds a starting price of $46,000.