Technology giant Hewlett-Packard announced that all six of its
internal next-generation data centers are now running company
operations worldwide on HP Networking solutions. The company said IT
engineers have replaced all of the non-HP core WAN routers and switches connecting the six data centers to each other and
the Internet. They also installed 75 HP A-series routers and switches
and upgraded and replaced 30 circuits with no data center downtime.
HP’s data centers are located in Houston, Austin and Atlanta – two in
each city. More than 85 worldwide internal data centers of 5,000 square
feet or more, plus hundreds of smaller server locations, were
consolidated into the six sites. The company said the next step in the
migration plan is the installation of HP products on the fringes of the
network connecting company facilities worldwide.
“This past April we said we’d be Cisco-free for core WAN routing and
switching in our data centers, and we are. We did it ahead of schedule
and are seeing performance even better than we expected,” said Ken
Gray, vice president of infrastructure for HP’s global information
technology division. “Our engineers have done a great job proving it’s
possible to run a network for a company the size and scale of HP on our
own products, and we did the migration without taking a data center
offline.”
The HP IT teams also transformed the network architecture based on open
standards. This open architecture helped facilitate the optimization of
the network using HP Networking, including HP TippingPoint products,
across the internal data center landscape, according to a company
release.
The company also recently installed A-Series products including 20 A8812
routers, six A6616 routers, 18 A6604 routers, 16 A12508 switches and 12
modular A9505 switches. The equipment supports more than 260 Gbs of WAN
data traffic, including 120 Gbs of Internet capacity – four times the
bandwidth of what was previously installed – and it runs high-volume
operations such as HP Internet Services and online transactions through
the company’s Website.
“When we talk to customers around the world, they’re looking for a full
networking portfolio provider with open architecture enabling an
alternative to the proprietary protocols they’ve been locked into for
decades,” said Randy Mott, executive vice president and CIO for HP. “We knew from the first evaluations of the
3Com technology that it would be an exceptional value for HP and HP
IT.”
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Hewlett-Packard 
