HP Seeks Edge From Channel In Latest SMB Push
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Hewlett-Packard&#39;s new small- and midsize- business initiatives will rely almost completely on the channel for solutions and services, with partners acting as a differentiator against rivals like Dell and IBM, HP executives said at last week&#39;s TechXNY show
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-Packard is enhancing security features on the HP-UX operating system for its Integrity line of servers amid growing customer concern about recent network security breaches. HP is announcing Monday the availability of a free upgrade to HP-UX 11i v2 that automatically encrypts data as it is stored. HP has offered this capability before, but this upgrade puts the encryption capability right into the operating system (OS). "If it's in the operating system, it's easily implemented without needing to do anything, and you're not going to break anything," said Charles Kolodgy, a research director at IDC focused on secure content and threat management products. IDC is about to release results of a survey of IT managers on their network security spending priorities for 2007, Kolodgy said. The survey will show that "file and folder encryption" has rocketed to the number one spot, from fifth in the 2006 survey, surpassing common concerns such as firewalls, network intrusion, viruses and spyware. What's changed in the last year is theÂ number of reports of serious security breaches, from theÂ U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs laptop stolenÂ in May and recovered in June, to the Dec. 12 report ofÂ hackers accessing personal information on 800,000Â current and prospective students at the University of California, Los Angeles. Sun Microsystems has added encryption capabilities to its Solaris OS that it originally offered only on its Trusted Solaris system for sensitive governmental use, Kolodgy said. And Microsoft is including an encryption feature called BitLocker in its new Vista OS. "They are all attempting to bring these solutions to the end user," he said, but he added that the HP upgrade is improved over prior HP offerings. HP is also offering an optional embedded chip on its Integrity servers that holds the digital keys to decrypt protected data. It claims this approach is more secure than software-based keys. Also, a new feature called HP Protected Systems allows a network security administrator to isolate certain data in unique compartments and configure different security settings for that data as needed. Adding encryption capabilities directly to storage hardware can require an expensive upgrade, which enterprises can avoid with an OS upgrade, said Ron Luman, the security architect for HP-UX. "What we have been asked to do [by customers] is provide something that is transparent to the applications and also transparent to the storage hardware, and so that means doing something to the operating system itself," Luman said.
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And clusters made of blades HP has added more Cisco networking gear options to its pre-packaged cluster product line.â¦
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'Shorty' kicks blades out of the data center and onto the floor The mid-market push has definitely been heating up for tech vendors in recent weeks. We've already seen Dell, IBM and Hitachi touting their simplified server and storage lines with SMB-aimed gear, and frankly, we're starting to recite the hard sell for companies with limited budgets and expertise in our sleep.â¦
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Storage vendors Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, EMC, and Microsoft are trumpeting new products this week that foreshadow the near future of storage.
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The idea is to wire the data center once, and then use HP's tool to add more blades at will.
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By Subashini Selvaratnam  TO meet the demanding workloads of enterprise users especially in areas such as business intelligence, Hewlett-Packard (M) Sdn Bhd has announced two additional models to its line of HP Integrity servers.
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Ziff Davis - HP is working with software makers to create bundles of their most popular small- and midsize-business applications preinstalled on HP systems, while IBM is bringing its Power 5 design to the SMB segment through its Express architecture.
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-Packard (HP) is offering a "virtual house call" service to users who have trouble getting their PCs to work HP Instant Care, announced Monday, provides personalized service over the Internet. Customers can sit at their home PCs while remote workers defragment a hard drive or speed up booting time by deleting extra files in the Start Up menu. HP's move follows remote IT services offered to business customers by Dell Inc. and Intel Corp. As PC prices continue to fall, some vendors are using improved customer service to differentiate their products in a crowded marketplace. Dell has been expanding its customer service in an effort to turn around poor earnings results. In June, the company launched "DellConnect", an expansion of its TechConnect service allowing Dell service agents to troubleshoot customers' PCs using a broadband Internet link instead of a personal visit. Dell claims the approach will save time and money compared to the cost of dispatching technicians. Likewise, remote monitoring is one of the cornerstones of Intel's vPro technology bundle for business desktops, launched in September. One ingredient of the bundle, Intel's Active Management Technology, allows IT managers to make fewer time-consuming "desk-side" visits by booting and repairing PCs remotely. HP, Gateway Inc. and Lenovo Group Ltd. have adopted the vPro platform in their business desktops. Dell offers a similar package in the OptiPlex 745 PC. HP Instant Care is free for HP customers whose computers are still under warranty and have purchased either PC Tune-up for $99 or SmartFriend for $59.99. Â
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By Clint Swett, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.  Feb. 24--Mirroring a business trend that's been building for two decades, Hewlett-Packard Co.
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Hewlett-Packard on Monday announced a new generation of blade PCs. This one uses an improved data-transmission protocol to improve performance for high-bandwidth needs, such as streaming video or graphics-intensive applications.
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HP and Microsoft combine forces to deliver some user-friendly features that take this early Windows Home Server box beyond mere network-attached storage.
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By Jordan Robertson Associated Press  SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Hewlett-Packard Co.
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-Packard has begun shipping a new product that the company thinks will give it an edge over rival IBMÂ in the market for blade servers. Beginning Tuesday, HP is set to begin delivering Virtual Connect, a management tool for its BladeSystem c-Class servers to more easily add blade servers to a network. Using Virtual Connect, which the company announced in June 2006, an enterprise can set up its data center network infrastructure ahead of time and then more easily add, subtract, change or move around servers as needed. Currently, enterprises deploy switches in their datacenter networks to connect servers to storage appliances. They're relatively cheap, but each of those switches is one more piece of hardware on the network that administrators need to manage, said Mark Potter, vice president of HP's BladeSystem business. Another alternative is to install a "patch panel," which doesn't require any separate management but is very expensive to deploy. Adding servers is also very time-consuming and requires the involvement of a company's server manager, network manager, storage manager, and others, Potter said. What should be a 30-minute task can sometimes take hours or even days. One HP customer told Potter it once took 58 days. "You know when they give you a number like 58 days that they've measured it and they're not happy about it," he said. Virtual Connect is built in to the datacenter infrastructure when it is first created. Then new servers can be simply plugged in and turned on. "We can wire up the infrastructure one time, physically, and basically walk away," Potter said. "Then the server admin can add, replace, and change servers on the fly without ever impacting the networking admin or the storage admin." Virtual Connect is hardware and middleware that sits between the blade server and the network switches that connect to storage. Virtual Connect for a network using Ethernet switches carries a starting list price of $5,699. For Fibre Channel networks, it starts at $9,499. Also Tuesday, HP is set to begin shipping a new blade server, the ProLiant xw460c (list price: $4,329), which HP describes as the first workstation blade for the c-Class blade product line. Virtual Connect is a unique solution to a data center headache, said Gordon Haff, principal analyst with Illuminata. "Virtual Connect does not eliminate [the work of configuring a network]. It still might take three or four weeks to do all that," Haff said. "But the idea is that you can basically do it once." Figures released Feb. 21 by Gartner show that IBM is the top blade seller but HP is gaining. HP's share of the x86 platform blade market, based on revenue, rose to 33 percent in 2006 from 32 percent in 2005, while IBM's fell to 40 percent from 42 percent, said Jeffrey Hewitt, a Gartner analyst. At the same time, though, the x86 blade market is growing. Global blade server revenue grew to $2.7 billion in 2006 from $2 billion in 2005 and unit shipments grew to 727,000 from 548,000 the year before, according to the Gartner report.
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IBM is extending a hand to businesses looking to improve their communications systems with a new package of hardware, software, and support services that rely on traditional IP-based networks.
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NEW YORKâHewlett-Packard Co. and Microsoft Corp. are taking to the road with a new initiative to bring technology to small and midsize businesses in remote parts of the country.
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HP looks to utility, aggregation and legacies Following on from the formal launch earlier this month of the latest version of its Integrity Servers equipped with dual-core Montecito processors, HP put on a users' bash in London to drum up business from both existing and new customers.â¦