Blade Watch

HP

HP today 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 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. The new products can be deployed in both telephony and IT networks, enabling customers to operate more efficiently as the two environments converge.

“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.

Industry support for HP platforms

Acision, which provides communications for more than 300 network operators and service providers globally, is using HP BladeSystem platforms as it takes advantage of the ongoing convergence between telephony and IT.

“As the world’s leading messaging company, Acision is focused on providing customers with high-value solutions quickly and cost-effectively,” said Anantha Ramu, vice president and principal architect, Engineering, Acision. “With the ability to host both enterprise and carrier-grade applications on a single platform, the HP Integrity BL860c server blade helps Acision minimize engineering and testing costs and reduce our time-to-market for new messaging solutions.”

Oracle, a global leader in communications software, is enabling communications service providers to scale services profitably on the latest generation of HP BladeSystem servers.

“The performance and scalability of the Oracle Communications software running on HP BladeSystem servers is an ideal blend for helping service providers increase monetization speed while maintaining control,” said Indu Kodukula, vice president, Service Delivery Products, Oracle. “The HP BladeSystem infrastructure reduced our engineering and integration costs, enabling our customers to scale immediately with low operating costs.”

New servers and storage expand HP portfolio

The new additions to HP’s carrier-grade portfolio include the following:

• HP ProLiant DL380 G6 server doubles performance over previous versions of the rack-mount server. It also provides significant gains in energy efficiency. Now available in a carrier-grade version, the HP ProLiant DL380 G6 includes two 2.53-GHz Intel quad-core processors.
• HP StorageWorks MSA2000fc G2 and MSA2000sa G2 carrier-grade storage arrays deliver support for high-availability and data protection capabilities through features such as snapshots for point-in-time copies of data. They support up to twenty-four 146 gigabyte SAS disks (3.5 terabytes) in a single 2U enclosure and are available in a dual-array controller configuration. A choice of host connectivity with Fibre Channel or SAS is also available.
• HP Integrity BL860c carrier-grade server blade provides extreme scalability and high performance for applications such as text messaging. The server blade is designed for the HP c7000-cg enclosure.
• HP ProLiant BL460c G6 carrier-grade server blade delivers performance that is two times faster than previous versions. Energy efficiency also is enhanced significantly. The HP ProLiant BL460c G6 is upgraded with two 2.53-GHz Intel quad-core processors, which enable a single HP BladeSystem c7000-cg enclosure to accommodate up to 16 blades for a total of 32 Intel quad-core processors in a 10U enclosure.

HP also announced enablement of OpenSAF and OpenHPI on HP BladeSystem Carrier-Grade and HP ProLiant Carrier-Grade rack-mount platforms. Both OpenSAF and OpenHPI are open source implementations of Service Availability Forum (SA Forum) specifications. HP is a founding member and major contributor to OpenSAF.

Bringing the efficiency and performance improvements of the G6 portfolio of products to the Carrier-Grade customers has to be a good thing for the Carrier-Grade community in terms of choice, and energy efficiency based on the new Intel processors with the uniform power supplies that have been introduced, which should reduce the range of power supplies kept on site for hot spares.

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