Life without Cisco

    Last week, HP issued a press release where, in a calm and restrained manner, in a casual way, very significant news was reported. At first glance, nothing special happened: the company's PR service reported that HP equipped its six data centers with its own network equipment. But in reality, this means that in the critical data center nodes that serve 300 thousand employees in 170 countries, HP was able to do without Cisco equipment.

    Cisco backbones in recent years have served as an informal benchmark in the world of telecommunications. The infrastructures of entire industries are “tied” to them, and entire generations of administrators have built their careers on knowledge of the equipment and protocols of only this vendor. Juniper and Extreme Networks have been trying to change this situation for a long time. HP did not seem to be participating in this technology race. But today, HP Networking has brought its products to the point of development where it has become possible to entrust them with the most ambitious tasks.

    “After exchanging opinions with customers from around the world, we came to the conclusion that they need a provider of a complete set of network products with an open architecture that can create an alternative to non-standard protocols that users have been tied to for decades,” said the HP IT Director Randy Mott. And HP decided to become an example here. HP Series A Switches

    came to replace third-party vendor equipment at 6 data centers in Houston, Austin and Atlanta . The migration took place in an operating mode, not one of the data centers stopped serving users even for a second. Let me remind you that several years ago these data centers replaced 85 data centers and hundreds of server rooms in local HP offices around the world.

    Along with the transition to their own equipment, HP Networking engineers, taking the opportunity, significantly expanded the capacity of the backbone network, raising it four times, to 260 Gb / s. This came in very handy, given the fact that the new architecture of data centers is specifically designed for the transfer of large amounts of data and lightning-fast transaction processing from HP.com.

    Transferring data centers to new tracks is only the first step in a serious reorganization of the company's general network. Equipment will gradually be replaced at the borders of the HP global network. Replacing the equipment of Cisco and other vendors in the "heart" of its backbone network, HP clearly stated that it can do the same for its customers, providing them with a full range of network products, from basic to backbone. Obviously, the integration into the HP structure of the divisions of the recently acquired 3Com company was successful and very timely.



    Specific models installed in the company's data centers as part of the reorganization: 20 A8812 routers, 6 A6616 routers, 18 A6604 routers, 16 A12508 switches and 12 A9505 modular switches.

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