HP looks to stay thin with Neoware purchase
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(InfoWorld) - It's been a busy Monday for Hewlett-Packard as the company announced not one, but two proposed purchases. Somewhat overshadowed by theÂ $1.6 billion HP is forking overÂ toÂ acquire datacenter automation specialist Opsware,Â is the $241 million the vendor is offering for Neoware. Publicly traded Neoware provides Linux- and Windows-based thin-client computing devices as well as thin-client and virtualization software. HP's keen to use Neoware to expand its existing thin-client business. "Our objective is to become the preferred brand of thin clients and software for virtualized client computing," said Kevin Frost, vice president of business desktops with HP's personal systems group, in a release. HP's offer values Neoware at $16.25 per share. Neoware's shares ended trading Friday at $15.24 and by midday Monday were trading up 3.7 percent at $15.81. Subject to shareholder approval, the acquisition is set to close in the fourth quarter of calendar 2007. On becoming part of HP, Neoware will be incorporated into the vendor's business desktop unit of its personal systems group. Neoware's partners include ClearCube Technology, IBM, Microsoft, and VMware. Publicly traded Neoware has its headquarters in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania as well as offices in Europe and Asia. Â
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(Source: HP)  HP Integrity servers: delivering a better return on your IT investment through flexible capacity, secured availability, and simplified management.
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) is using streamlined IT management as a sales pitch for its latest line of PCs, including the first desktops to use Intel Corp.'s vPro technology bundle. A computer running the vPro bundle uses software and hardware -- including Intel's new "Conroe" Core 2 Duo processor -- to automate some aspects of IT management and network security. Intel plans to formally announce the platform Thursday, as Gateway Inc. and Lenovo Group Ltd. also start sellingÂ vPro-enabled desktops. HP got a jump on its competition, particularly arch-rival Dell Inc., by unveiling its new business line first. HP announced three new desktops, a workstation and six notebooks during a press conference Wednesday in New York City. Only the desktops offer the vPro option, while the other new PCs take advantage of the flurry of chips launched in recent months, including Intel's "Merom" Core 2 Duo for the notebooks and a choice of Intel's "Woodcrest" Xeon 5100 or Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s (AMD's) "Rev. F" Next-Generation Opteron for the workstation. HP promised to make life easier for the IT managers who maintain these machines by pre-loading its OpenView Configuration Management agent on all commercial notebooks, desktops and workstations. That product has been an option in the past. OpenView will bolster Intel's Active Management Technology, an ingredient of vPro, allowing IT managers to make fewer time-consuming "desk-side" visits by booting and repairing PCs remotely, said John Snaider, HP's vice president for desktop PCs. Other business-friendly enhancements on the desktops include Trusted Platform Model (TPM) 1.2 security chips, a second hard drive for real-time data backup, and a virtual partition on the hard drive for encrypting sensitive data, said Brian Schmitz, director of desktop product marketing for HP. In contrast to its concentration on Intel-powered desktops, HP is selling the new xw9400 workstation as the AMD-powered peer of its xw8400 model. AMD-based PCs account for about one-third of HP's high-end workstation sales, since they are able to run certain Nvidia graphics cards that Intel cannot handle, said Jeff Wood, HP's director of product marketing for workstations. HP is selling the dc7700 desktop for US$643, plus a premium for the vPro option. The company will launch the dc5700 and dc5750, which will be available with either Intel or AMD chips, in the fourth quarter. The xw9400 workstation will ship later in September for $1,800. The notebooks include the HP Compaq 9400 for $1,299; 8400 for $1,449; nx7400 for $849; nc6400 for $1,199; 6300 for $799; and 4400 for $1,479. DetailedÂ information about the new systems can be found at Hewlett-Packard's Web site. Â
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Thin-client computing has been around for a decade, but the rising costs of updating software and installing security patches on networked personal computers is sparking renewed interest
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'White box' PCs are expected to retain a big share of PC sales, even as brand name prices drop.
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InfoWorld - Hewlett-Packard Co. is sticking with processors from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) in a new family of blade PCs designed to compete with offerings from IBM Corp.
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Hewlett-Packard next year will take a fresh approach to its utility computing initiative with a product designed to reduce the cost of running corporate computing systems.
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(InfoWorld) - Following a similar move by Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu Siemens Computers plans to announce a packaged storage area network (SAN) product on Thursday aimed at small and medium-size businesses. The bundle will comprise Fujitsu Siemens' FibreCAT SX RAID storage devices, switches from Brocade Communications Systems,. and host bus adapters from Emulex. It will be priced under â¬8,000 ($10,566), Fujitsu Siemens said. Business-class data protection has traditionally been expensive and difficult to deploy, so many smaller businesses have shied away from SANs. The bundled product, which customers can order under a single part number, aims to cut down on the complexity of choosing components to put together a SAN. It also aims to simplify installation and operation, Fujitsu Siemens said. Businesses that buy the package will be able to expand their SAN as their needs change, according to the company. The demand for greater security and compliance are driving growth in the market for SANs, Fujitsu Siemens said. In October,Â HP introduced SAN productsÂ also aimed at smaller businesses. It includes a blade storage device, a starter kit for simplifying the set-up and operation of SANs, and a virtual tape technology for data backup and recovery. HP's starter kit also included components from Emulex and Brocade. Â
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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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HP (NYSE:HPQ) (Nasdaq:HPQ) today announced that it has refreshed its entire line of HP Integrity servers -- adding the most powerful models to date -- to drive down the cost of business-critical computing for customers.
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Hewlett-Packard and ClearCube Technology have upgraded their rival PC blade systems in an effort to give them more PC-like performance -- and hopefully make them more appealing to users.
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Hewlett-Packard officials shed more light on Wal-Mart's agreement to use its Neoview data warehouse appliance, including its plan to use feedback from the retailer to upgrade the product.
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H.P. unveiled its first mobile thin client as the vendor continues to ramp up its desktop virtualization technology following the acquisition of former competitor Neoware.
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By Brad Hem, Houston Chronicle  Feb. 18--An engineering team at HP had figured out how to squeeze a faster and more powerful computer server into one-third the traditional space. That was supposed to be the hard part.
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com October 29, 2004, 12:02 PM PT. ZDNet&#39;s survey of IT professionals in October kept upgrading hardware at number two on the businesses radar throughout the year.
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Small drive for fat wallets Hewlett-Packard is henceforth packing flash solid-state drives into upcoming models of its ultra-slim business desktops.â¦
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A corporation is not the person the legal fiction makes it so much as a collection of different interests. I was reminded of this fact a couple of weeks ago when I went shopping for a laptop. Remembering that Hewlett-Packard almost singlehandedly solved the basic problem of laser printer support for GNU/Linux, I ended up buying one of the company's laptops. Consumer reports, price, and HP's listing as one of the greener hardware manufacturers according to Greenpeace also affected my decision, but my impression of HP as a free software friendly company was a large criteria.