Roundup: HP, Oracle, Sun, Avaya

Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

HP announces new converged infrastructure products.  HP announced new high-performance security solutions designed to prevent network breaches in a converged infrastructure by delivering comprehensive data protection across both physical and virtual environments.  Under the TippingPoint brand HP is introducing the Secure Virtualization Framework (SVF) as a suite of products designed to help prevent network threats from impacting virtualized environments.  The first product announced in this suite is the Virtual Controller (vController) and extends TippingPoint security by routing it through an HP TippingPoint N-Platform Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) appliance.  HP is also introducing a new TippingPoint Reputation Digital Vaccine service (Rep DV) as a means to give IPS solutions up to date and accurate lists of malicious or suspicious websites.  Two new TippingPoint S-series solutions address the core of the data center for both physical and virtual domains.  The new TippingPoint S1200N IPS A7500 Module delivers advanced IPS security inspection in a blade.  The new TippingPoint S1500 SSL Appliance is a dedicated solution for decrypting and re-encrypting Secure Sockets Layer website traffic.  In addition to new security product announcements, HP also announced a new Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) module for the HP A5820 data center switch.

Oracle unveils Sun Fire x86 clustered systems. Oracle (ORCL) announced its next-generation Sun Fire x86 Clustered Systems, including rackmount servers, blades and a 10 GbE cluster fabric.  “We are the first to deliver high-performing application-to-disk solutions that can be managed and supported as a single system. This is a major step forward in providing a completely optimized solution that delivers enterprise-class performance and scale while reducing management complexity and costs for customers," said John Fowler, Executive Vice President for Sun Systems at Oracle. Oracle says the Sun Fire x86 Clustered Systems deliver up to 45 percent improvement in energy efficiency over the previous generation of systems and they double the virtual machine live migration performance with the Oracle 10 GbE cluster fabric.  Oracle Integrated Lights Out Manager provides a single point of management interface for all hardware components – blades, servers, storage, networking, power and virtualization.

Avaya prepares one-box strategy.  Network World reports that Avaya is preparing to launch a one-box data center strategy in October called the VSP 9000 switch.  Since Avaya does not have the comparable server and storage assets to compete with a complete Cisco UCS solution, the Avaya box is purely a switch.The VSP 9000 is meant to address the infrastructure piece of the equation and let other vendors cover applications, storage and other aspects.  The device will be marketed to current Nortel switch customers who may be positioned to appreciate the technology.