HP continued to hammer home its converged network story at Interop Las Vegas 2011 Tuesday, and in its bid to be a major networking player the tech powerhouse drew a line in the sand by welcoming competition, but claiming it does networking better than the rest of the field, namely chief rival Cisco.
"We believe competition is a good thing," Dave Donatelli, HP executive vice president and general manager of enterprise servers, storage and networking told a capacity Interop crowd during his keynote. "Over the last decade, networking has had the least amount of competition."
Donatelli cited recent Gartner research that found that single-vendor networking architectures aren't the best models. He also referenced a Baird study that found that 75 percent of resellers have HP as part of their networking discussions and 29 percent of resellers said HP is influencing deal terms and winning over Cisco.
Calling legacy networks disjointed and calling for architectures that string together networking, virtualization and security, Donatelli said HP wants to dismantle the traditional methods of networking and prompt a shift that alters current architectures and makes them ready for the cloud computing boom.
"Every network should be cloud ready, whether you're moving today or moving tomorrow," he said.
Donatelli said HP's products span the entire IT industry and its converged infrastructure of servers, storage and networks, along with next-generation data centers and the cloud, is making it a networking force.
"We want to transform the networking industry going forward," he said.
Donatelli showcased HP's FlexNetwork architecture offerings, which the company unveiled at Interop earlier this week. He added that the new HP gear out-performs Cisco in head-to-head competition.
"We believe on a spec basis … we win out on specifications alone," he said.
For example, HP's new 10500 core switches beat out Cisco Catalyst 6509 with 75 percent lower latency, 250 percent higher performance and 270 percent higher 10 Gigabit Ethernet density.
Donatelli said HP's new E5400 and E8200 line cards, when stacked against Cisco Catalyst 4506, win out with up to 90 percent lower latency, 600 percent higher performance and 128 percent higher port density.
Meanwhile, Donatalli said HP's recent wireless product plays beat Cisco's 1140 and 3500 access points with 50 percent higher performance; the ability to stream 15 high-definition videos per AP versus Cisco's ability to stream 10; and 150 mbps performance at 200 feet versus Cisco's 30 feet.
And on the security side, Donatelli said HP's TippingPoint S6100N trounces Cisco's 4270 with 100 percent greater performance, 33 percent lower power consumption and the discover of 309 vulnerabilities versus Cisco's one.
"Any way you look at it, the technology and the innovation come through," he said.
Donatelli also showcased HP's management console, a single pane of glass management console that can support 2,600-plus devices from 35 different manufactures, including more than 1,000 devices from Cisco.
"We can take 30 different management technologies that Cisco has and do it in one," he said.
The management offering can also manage Extreme, Juniper and other vendors' physical and virtual offerings. But it's the Cisco management where it shines, Donatelli said.
"We manage Cisco better than Cisco manages itself," Donatelli said, citing customer responses.
