HP: New Internal Data Center 'Cisco-Free'

In a press release Monday, HP announced that one of its new internal data centers includes 3Com, HP ProCurve and TippingPoint gear, and no Cisco products of any kind.

"We're not locked into proprietary protocols that many in the IT industry are familiar with and this gives us more flexibility to change as our business grows," said Ken Gray, vice president, Infrastructure, Global Information Technology Organization, HP, in a statement. "We're Cisco-free in this data center and have a plan to extend this freedom across all of our internal IT data centers next year."

According to HP, its new data center -- based near Houston and one of six HP data centers based in Texas and Georgia -- includes 34 3Com core routers, four TippingPoint intrusion detection and protection devices, and north of 300 HP ProCurve switches.

Construction began in February 2009, and HP said its engineers finished the network build-out in March. The network products within the data center are all ProCurve in the switching layer, and the intrusion and prevention systems are all 3Com. The new architecture, HP said in the release, allows it to reduce data center power consumption levels as much as 50 percent.

In the statement, HP took another not-so-subtle swipe at Cisco, urging customers to adopt HP's data center model for future infrastructure needs.

"This networking technology provides a true competitive choice in a space that has needed more choices for almost two decades," said Randy Mott, executive vice president and chief information officer, HP. "These new products, along with HP's Converged Infrastructure portfolio, are something every CIO should be taking advantage of."

According to HP, Mott will join Marius Haas, senior vice president and general manager of HP's Networking group, and Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager of Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking for HP's Enterprise Business, on an 11:30am Eastern conference call to discuss the HP-3Com roadmap.