Friday, September 17, 2010

The Ascendency of Hewlett Packard?

On Thursday I sat through several hours of Hewlett Packard presentations as part of the Net Tech Field Day program. Is there finally a viable competitor to Cisco across multiple product lines?

(Disclaimer – Hewlett Packard is one of the sponsoring organizations of this event. There is no obligations for me to write anything about HP, or the other participants in this event. So while these musings came out of a sponsored trip, they are assuredly my own thoughts)

Through its recent acquisition of 3Com, Hewlett Packard has acquired some fairly impressive networking technology. The A-Series switch line stacks up well to Cisco’s Nexus product line. If you read the following marketing description, can you determine if this is a description of the Nexus 7K platform or of the HP A-12500? I don’t think I could:

Next-generation, large core/data center switching platforms with innovative Intelligent Resilient Framework (IRF) technology. 18- and 6-slot switches with up to 6.6 Tbps performance and up to 128 (1:1) or 512 (4:1) 10GbE ports, and 864 GbE ports. Non-blocking, zero service interruption design, and architecture support for 40 GbE and 100 GbE. Wire speed L2/IPv4/IPv6/MPLS.

Except for the mentioning of IRF and the slot count, it sounds like the Nexus 7K to me. (Reference http://h10144.www1.hp.com/products/switches/index.aspx#A12500).

Unfortunately HP didn’t provide any tangible information about how this switch looks and feels in a predominantly Cisco network. The Tech Field Day participants pleaded for some white papers and/or deployment guides, but none are available at this time. In a somewhat ominous sign, the A-Series presenter mentioned that a design guide had been written, but HP has not yet determined if it would be treated as proprietary information for HP’s services organization.

Takeaways

I have two main takeaways from the HP portion of Tech Field Day:

1) Cisco may have a viable competitor across their networking product line.

If the industry rejects new Cisco-proprietary protocols in the Data Center (L2MP, VNTag), HP and other DC switching vendors (Arista, Force10, Juniper) will be able to compete directly on “speeds and feeds.” This would not be good for Cisco. Once a company goes multi-vendor, Cisco will lose its pricing power across the majority of its product lines. This is a good thing for the industry. Buying 3Com makes that equipment line a viable solution for businesses. I did not have enough faith in 3Com as a standalone company to recommend their gear for my network. (As an aside, I do not have faith in Foundry, even after being acquired by Brocade)

What also must be said is that HP is taking a huge risk here. My organization is building a greenfield data center soon. Historically we’ve gone with HP for the majority of our compute power (C-class blade chassis) and Cisco for most of the network components. If HP wants an opportunity to bid for the network side of this project, we’ll also need to open the compute side up to Cisco. All’s fair, right? The issue with this is that the network opportunity is approximately one-third the size of the compute opportunity. HP is effectively risking X for a shot at X * 1.33, while Cisco is risking Y for a shot at 4 * Y.

2) HP’s large services organization could significantly hinder their ability to gain traction in the marketplace.

There are basically two types of resellers in the network marketplace. There are those that compete on price and attempt to shave a few percentage points of margin off every sale, and there are those who make their margins based on consulting or management services that are sold along with networking equipment. My organization generally prefers the former, as we are comfortable with our ability deploy complex networking solutions. Price is usually our deciding factor for equipment purchases, although we have made exceptions for new technology, such as WAN acceleration and Cisco’s ACNS video platform. The problem with utilizing the cheapest provider is that the purchaser and networking equipment vendor has to take responsibility for the network architecture, product selection and installation.

For organizations that have less network know-how, purchasing from resellers that can deliver the installation and management services required is a more attractive option. They can provide network designs and product selection advice. If the reseller has agreements with multiple equipment vendors, they can help determine which vendors' equipment best fits the customer’s needs. As a network engineer, these are the resellers I want to see in the marketplace, because they offer interesting jobs.

So what does this have to do with HP? As mentioned above, HP isn’t sure whether their deployment guides will be released to the general public, or for that matter, even to their resellers. This is ridiculous. If HP wants the world to adopt their product line, they need to do everything possible to educate the engineers responsible for deployments. If HP’s plan is to have their own services organization take the bulk of HP network deployments, they’ll lose all the value-added resellers. Those are the resellers they need the most, since they are the ‘trusted advisors’ for businesses. Without their support, HP will be forced to identify and win every networking deal on their own.

5 comments:

Brad Hedlund said...

Jeremy,
I'm wondering how HP can get "128" line rate ports when slots 9,16-19 are only 40G/slot. Did HP explain that?

Thanks,
Brad

Jeremy Filliben said...

Brad,

Is that the case? HP did not provide details about bandwidth / slot, so I inferred it from the 128 10G ports divided by 16 interface slots. I couldn't find anything on their website that contradicts this math, but I am happy to get clarification.

So to answer your question, no, they didn't answer that. I wish they had! I'll follow up and post an updated comment when/if I get a response.

Jeremy

Anonymous said...

Brad and Jeremy,

The method we use to get to the number of 128 wirerate 10Gig ports for the A12518 is based on the use of 16x16 fabrics. This was due to the limitation of currently available off the shelf silicon at the time we went into production with this switch.

That being said, what this allowed us to do is take the last four slots of the chassis, 15-18, and split the bandwidth across those four slots.

What this accomplished is the ability for us to run 8 port 10Gig line cards at full wirerate in slots 1-14 and then 4 port 10Gig line cards in slots 15-18 for a total of 128 wirerate 10Gig interfaces.

On the A12508 there is no such limitation so we have the ability to populate all slots with 8 port 10Gig blades for a total of 64 wirerate ports.

We have worked with Spirent to validate our claims and have published reports that not only confirm this but also proves that we can pass traffic at Layer 2, Layer 3, IPv4 and IPv6 with zero packet loss.

Lastly, to clarify the statement that Brad alluded to in our documentation. Slot 9 does support a full 80Gig. That is a typo in some of our documentation and is being addressed and in the new HP Networking documentation.

In the near future you will see this resolved along with much higher capacities and speeds as we move forward.

Thank you for keeping us honest and feel free to question anything you see coming from HP. We have nothing to hide and hope that you will see that we are truly a worthy competitor to the incumbents!

Jeff
Technical Marketing Engineer,
HP Networking Data Center products (including A12500 Series)

DanHammans said...

Your comments about trusted advisors for businesses is spot on. If HP expects to compete in that marketplace they are not going to be able to have their cake (make money on the hardware sales) and eat it too (make money on professional services deployments).

By withholding information from resellers and professional services organizations they are going to lose a ton of business to Cisco who embraces the partner channel much more.

Jeremy Filliben said...

Dan,

I am becoming a bit more concerned with Cisco's encroachment into the consulting space as well. Cisco Advanced Services initially appeared to be a high-touch organization for the Top 20 or so customers. Now they employ 300+ consultants, and have dozens of open positions posted on CCO. Coupled with the rumor of a dividend, it looks like we're seeing the early stages of the IBM-ification of Cisco.

Jeremy