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.
Chuck Smith, vice president, BladeSystem business development at HP, commented: “Customers are looking for flexible, open platforms that deliver greater speed, more agility and lower costs. 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, HP claimed.
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.