With a host of new cost-efficient, ruggedized solutions, Hewlett-Packard is taking another step closer to fully converged telephony and data center infrastructure.

“What we've seen over the last five years is the shift from custom hardware built to handle telephony to more commoditized products from the data center that integrate more fully into customers’ telecom infrastructure,” says Lloyd Mayhew, worldwide business development manager for HP's telecommunications infrastructure products.

This move toward a convergence of IP and telephony infrastructure necessitates a whole new approach to hardware, Mayhew says, that adds telephony-specific requirements to readily available commodity data center hardware. The new offerings provide telecom companies with the reliability set by Network Equipment Building Systems (NEBS) requirements, as well as the lower cost and flexibility of industry-standard products.

The new products are targeted at network and telephony service providers, and 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.

“These customers need products with features like minus 48-volt power supplies and ruggedized systems that can withstand earthquakes and high temperatures,” Mayhew says. “So, we’ve taken our most popular products and selected those that we can easily adapt to these requirements.”

The new products include the HP ProLiant DL380 G6 rack-mount server, the HP Integrity BL860c carrier-grade server blade designed for the HP c7000-cg blade enclosure and the HP ProLiant BL460c G6 carrier-grade server blade.

The HP ProLiant BL460c G6 is upgraded with two 2.53GHz Intel quad-core processors, which offer enhanced performance and power savings, Mayhew says. The telephony features are included in the new solutions at no additional cost, which provides a huge advantage for ISPs and network service providers, Mayhew says.

Along with new enterprise servers and blades, HP has also announced new carrier-grade modular storage array (MSA) solutions for the telephony market, says Charles Vallhonrat, product marketing manager, MSA arrays and enclosures, at HP. The new HP StorageWorks MSA2000fc G2 with Fibre Channel connectivity and MSA2000sa with SAS connectivity both offer high-availability and data protection capabilities as well as NEBS certification for the telephony industry, Vallhonrat says.

“We’re very focused on extending our entire platform, including these new MSAs, to include features that meet the needs of telephony and data center solution providers,” Vallhonrat says.