HP Blasts Cisco's Proprietary Data Center StrategyHP Blasts Cisco's Proprietary Data Center Strategy

Hewlett-Packard has opened up a new data center featuring all-HP equipment with twice the density and half the power consumption of "previous solutions." Poking the eye of its former partner and current competitor, an HP VP said, "We're Cisco-free in this data center and have a plan to extend this freedom across all of our internal IT data centers next year."From an HP press release:

"We're not locked into proprietary protocols that many in the IT industry are familiar with and this gives us more flexibility to change as our business grows," said Ken Gray, vice president, Infrastructure, Global Information Technology Organization, HP. Gray then added his "We're Cisco-free in this data center" line from above.

In addition, Hewlett-Packard CIO and executive vice-president Randy Mott added his high-impact voice to the anti-proprietary chorus, saying, "This networking technology provides a true competitive choice in a space that has needed more choices for almost two decades."

After joining HP about five years ago, Mott worked closely with CEO Mark Hurd to create a strategy for consolidating 85 HP data centers down to six. The new data center based near Houston is one of those six and features 34 of 3Com's routing devices (HP just acquired 3Com), more than 300 HP ProCurve switches, and four TippingPoint intrusion-detection and protection devices, HP said.