After a lack of major progress in networks for 10 years, HP is bringing innovation back to the networking industry.  It’s a critical time given that most legacy networks are on the brink, overburdened by the explosion of data, communication and technology services.

The research underway in the Networking and Communications Lab of HP Labs aims to solve these problems.  By delivering technology that is an order of magnitude faster but only a tenth of the cost of today’s networking gear, HP intends to help customers reach the goal of a fully and rapidly customized network fabric that can be re-programmed to meet their evolving, and perhaps yet unknown, requirements.

In pursuit of this goal, two areas HP Labs is exploring include flexible programmable networks and optical backplanes.

With flexible programmable networks using OpenFlow technology, network administrators are able to connect users to applications in a more direct way. OpenFlow enables networks to be flexible and evolve by giving a remote software “controller” the power to change features or performances of devices on a network through certain established programmed “rules”. These “rules” help to control the flow of data within the network and also across multiple network devices, improving the overall data traffic flow and easing the introduction and deployment of new applications and features.

HP Labs Distinguished Technologist Charles Clark provides a great explanation of OpenFlow in this video:



For the hardware infrastructure, HP is conducting research around optical backplanes to replace the electrical backplane used to route traffic in network switches today. Existing networks currently run 40 Gb/s and 100 Gb/s speed network devices. If transmissions are to go faster than this, which they will need to do based on trends in current usage, there needs to be a different way to pass data, and optical backplanes is the solution for that challenge.

HP Labs Distinguished Technologist Mike Tan demos HP's innovative optical backplane technology in this video:

Transforming today’s networks is not something that can happen overnight; companies have legacy applications and infrastructure that will take time to migrate and systems to rebuild. The good news is that this is the first time in a decade that network technologies are evolving with the demands of the network. HP is at the forefront of this evolution with a migration plan and roadmap for customers.

To learn more about how HP Labs and the technical leads in HP’s Networking group are working together to help HP customers handle the network demands of the years to come, watch this video of Networking and Communications Lab Director David Lee from the recent HP Networking Innovation Day.

This August, Jeff Bergeron, HP's Chief Technology Officer for U.S. Public Sector, moderated a discussion on cloud computing with Martha Dorris and Bajinder Paul from the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA). Dorris and Paul shared their insights on key issues of using IT to reduce public sector costs and the challenges of cloud computing innovations for both industry and government. The event was a part of FedScoop's Fedtalks 2011 series in Washington, D.C.  

Hear more from Bergeron on the conversation:

In keeping with our history of supply chain social and environmental responsibility, HP continues to work to ensure that our products do not contain metals that may be sourced from mineral trade associated with armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

As part of an ongoing multi-stakeholder process to address the issue, HP has joined AVX Corporation in its "Solutions for Hope Project," which delivers verified conflict-free DRC tantalum ore through a secure “closed pipe” supply line. The project was established in July 2011 to demonstrate a process for delivering conflict-free tantalum material from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) under the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) due diligence guidance. On August 30, 2011, the project received the first shipment of ore.

“The ‘Solutions for Hope Project’ provides the transparency, traceability and verifications needed to ensure a responsible mineral supply chain and is a model for other suppliers,” said Tony Prophet, senior vice president, Personal Systems Group, HP. “HP commends AVX for their leadership on this issue and we look forward to delivering HP products with capacitors from AVX's 'closed pipe' supply line in the near future.”

AVX is a leading international supplier of electronic passive components and interconnect solutions and will process the conflict-free tantalum ore into capacitors for shipment to HP and other project participants for incorporation into end market products. The initial delivery of conflict-free tantalum ore is a small but crucial first step to fulfilling the project’s goal of establishing a secure “closed pipe” supply line from the DRC region. This will both help companies respect human rights and avoid contributing to conflict through their mineral or metal purchasing decisions and practices, while providing income to artisanal miners and communities in the DRC region.

HP continues to help work alongside other industries to drive the creation of a certification mechanism, which can provide assurances that the metals used in our products are not sourced from mineral trade associated with conflict in the DRC. While we continue to contribute to a workable certification mechanism, we have not waited to take action in our own supply chain. We believe that it is our responsibility to create awareness and encourage accountability in our supply chain and we will continue to do so, while cross industry processes or standards are established.

(This entry was cross-posted from the HP Scaling the Cloud blog and was authored by Emil Sayegh, VP, Cloud Services)

Today, we are pleased to invite you to participate in the HP Cloud Services private beta program. We are making this early access available so you can test, experience and provide input on our two initial cloud services: HP Cloud Compute and HP Cloud Object Storage. Both offerings are based on HP’s world class hardware and software with key elements of HP Converged Infrastructure and HP Software combined with a developer friendly, integration of OpenStack™ through our easy to use, web-based User Interface (UI) along with open, RESTful APIs.

At HP Cloud Services, our goal is to provide the next generation of cloud infrastructure, platform services and cloud solutions for developers, ISVs, and businesses of all sizes. We recognize that public cloud services should be open and transparent from end-to-end across APIs, infrastructure and software stack.  

We believe that by working closely with the developer community and combining the best open source technologies with HP’s hardware and software portfolio, we can create the right mix of capabilities that deliver best customer experience.  

Last month we announced that we joined OpenStack, an infrastructure cloud open source project.  HP developers are already active and many of our ideas will be shared at the upcoming OpenStack Design Summit and Conference, of which we are a sponsor.

The first two offerings in our private beta are compute and storage infrastructure-as-a-service offered as pay-as-you-go services that can be up and running within minutes. 

• HP Cloud Compute allows you to deploy compute instances on-demand.  It lets you customize your instances to handle your unique workloads and add new instances to quickly scale. 

• HP Cloud Object Storage provides you with scalable online storage capacity on-demand.  Object storage is ideal for archiving and backing up data, serving static content for web applications, and storing large public or private data sets, such as online files and media. 

We already collected some great feedback during our first development stage, which strongly influenced our private beta offerings.  Now we would like to hear from more of you and get your input on features, functionality and the overall experience, in order to ensure that we continue to create an offering that matches your needs.

HP intends to extend its full spectrum of cloud offerings spanning private, hybrid, and public architectures. You can have confidence that HP Cloud Services will have the same commitment to leadership that HP has with our existing cloud portfolio including HP CloudSystem and HP Enterprise Cloud Services.

If you want to find out what happens when the cloud meets one of the most recognized names in technology, we invite you to sign up for the HP Cloud Services free private beta to develop, test and run your applications. To register, simply visit www.hpcloud.com. We are accepting only a limited number of private beta applicants—so please register early.

Please stay tuned to this blog and our website at www.hpcloud.com for further details on our offerings. Feel free to reach out to us on Twitter (@hpcloud) or on our blog for feedback or questions.

We look forward to hearing from you.

The HP Cloud Services Team