HP Enhances Server Networking and Storage Technologies

HP (www.hp.com) today announced advances in its server networking and storage technologies to help customers simplify their IT infrastructures, improve manageability and performance and lower the costs of enterprise computing environments.

Innovating on top of standards, HP is now offering the industry's first multifunction networking adapters, which provide a "unified fabric" for networking, storage and high-performance clustering over a single connection point.

Working with partners such as Broadcom and Seagate, HP has extended the industry-standard capabilities of existing networks and SAS-based storage with innovations that can be deployed in existing environments.

"Customers expect HP technology and product innovations to improve their productivity and lower their cost of ownership," said Brad Anderson, senior vice president and general manager, Industry Standard Servers, HP.

The typical server environment requires separate connectivity products for networking, storage, interconnects and infrastructure management. With HP's new multifunction networking adapters, customers can use a single connection to manage their infrastructure as a single, unified fabric.

Working closely with Broadcom, HP developed and plans to ship the industry's first multifunction networking adapters - the HP NC370F and the NC370T for PCI-X bus architectures - which help reduce the complexity and costs that customers experience when configuring their server infrastructure.

"We are pleased that our development relationship with HP has resulted in these leading-edge networking products based on Broadcom's 5706 networking silicon," said Tom Lagatta, group vice president, Enterprise Computing Group, Broadcom.

HP's SAS offering gives customers improved performance, reliability and scalability while delivering less power consumption and greater configuration flexibility compared to the parallel connections that most architectures have today.

"As data demands in the enterprise continue to grow, HP and Seagate have worked closely to ensure that the entry of SAS in the marketplace is optimally timed to meet the performance demands of the upcoming HP systems," said Brian Dexheimer, executive vice president, Global Sales and Marketing, Seagate.

"Deploying SAS-based systems will enable users to take advantage of new levels of breakthrough performance and scalability while retaining the functionality and reliability of SCSI."

HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, global services, business and home computing, and imaging and printing.