HP FlexCampus news: Accelerating rich media communications and mobility with secure access
By John P. Gray, Global Solution Manager, HP Networking
The reality of the consumerization of IT (aka the iPOD effort) is forcing traditional enterprise IT to support a new wave of fully featured mobile devices and multimedia collaborative applications on existing legacy networks. And the reality is, many networks are unable to meet the bandwidth, latency (QoS) and security demands that these new applications and services require.
In fact, many of the customers I have spoken are very concerned that this new wave of on-demand, rich media communications building across their networks have the potential to CRUSH their networks.
I’ve seen reference from industry analysis predicating that by 2013; more than 25 percent of the content that workers see in a day would be dominated by pictures, video or audio.
I would argue that percentage would be much higher. I say that based on my personal experience as well as what I’ve learned speaking to many customers who are facing this multi-media explosion.
Why this week’s HP Networking news is good news for rich media and mobile
The good news for customers is that this week at Interop Fall 2011, HP continues to Change the Rules of Networking by delivering on our HP FlexNetwork architecture strategy with a continuous stream of innovations that address these emerging demands across the entire enterprise—from the data center to the campus to the extended enterprise edge.
Delivering high-bandwidth, low latency multimedia across the campus
Our new HP 3800 Series Switches are designed with a unique meshed stacking technology that fortifies a virtual backplane with direct links from and to each switch in the stack. This technological innovation along with dual hot-swappable power supplies and field replaceable fans ensures less downtime for your end-users with true modular chassis-like performance and resiliency in a flexible stackable form-factor.
With integrated 10 Gigabit uplinks in either SFP+ or 10GBase-T, IEEE 802.3at PoE+ capability, and full layer 3 software feature set, the HP 3800 provides the performance needed for today's high-definition, media-rich applications running over the enterprise campus network.
These new switches deliver up to 450% higher stacking throughput, 76% lower latency and 122% higher 10 GbE density than comparable competitive campus Ethernet switches.
In fact, we were so impressed with our internal performance tests of these new switches, we commissioned Tolly Enterprises, LLC to do a competitive comparison between the HP 3800 and Cisco's Cataylst 3750-X and Juniper's EX4200 switches. Let's just let the numbers speak for themselves. Read the report now.
When paired with our new HP 10500 campus core series switches, you can build simplified 2-tier, high-performance, low latency multi-media infrastructures that provide an unmatched user experience.
Orchestrating and securing smart mobile device access
HP is addressing the issue of the explosion in the number of mobile devise that require access to services while needing to manage the appropriate types and levels of network security policies. With HP Intelligent Management Center (IMC) 5.1, we are expanding the capabilities to provide flexible access that aligns with network policies for all types of devices—smart phones to tablets to PCs) and users on wired or wireless networks.
So whether you want to authenticate by user, device or both, your IMC 5.1 authenticates with the appropriate network policies applied. IMC provides a comprehensive management solution and its Network Access Control is an extension of the overall solution. Network administrators do not have to deploy additional hardware devices on the network which ironically would also need to be managed to control network access.
>> (video) Mike Nielsen, HP Director Solutions Marketing announcement summary
>> Learn more about these new HP FlexNetwork announcements and how HP continues to Change the Rules of Networking to enable the cloud.
>> Follow the HP Buzz at Interop 2011.
>> Follow us on Twitter: @HP_Networking #Interop #HP
