HP ONE—or Should We Say “Many”
Expanding or developing an ecosystem from a point product or technology solution to a broad-reaching one is always a beneficial effort from vendors for their customers. HP’s just announced Open Network Ecosystem (ONE) is certainly a logical strategy and effort to expand basic Ethernet (some might say “data center”) switching to provide a broad array of data center and application-enabling IT services—e.g. load balancing, IP security, VoIP, WAN optimization.
This is a strategy Cisco has espoused—and innovated + executed on—for years with the Catalyst, Nexus, ISR and other product families…
Looking Deeper
However, to really benefit the customer, much more needs to be done than merely host other vendors’ operating systems and code on your processing hardware and physical chassis. As we all know, different IP services all do different things to data and application traffic—from firewalls and IPS’ inspecting and enforcing traffic safety, to WAN optimization compressing/de-duplicating/optimizing application protocols.
Clearly each of these services does different things to the traffic, and thus the underlying technology transporting the traffic must natively support each of these services. This includes keeping the traffic fully transparent to each service, as well as natively and automatically re-directing traffic flows to-and-from the service in the proper order.
This is where HP ONE (or least this week’s announcement) isn’t so clear, as there doesn’t seem to be a technology like WCCP (or similar method) to ensure that each service can be engaged, executed and traffic passed back from it. Rather, each ONE partner vendor’s software is merely hosted on a half-size ONE service module, without custom development that enables the seamless passing of traffic to and from each individual service.
The result—while certainly operable—can become much more operational complex than deploying point products, depending on a customer’s particular set of services and data center architecture. Examples: Does the HP switch ensure that Riverbed WAN optimization on a ONE module will interact with/support another ONE module with McAfee security? Or that Riverbed on a ONE module will not tunnel and damage HP quality of service (QoS), or should the customer use HP QoS and turn off Riverbed’s? And then there’s the issue of obtaining knwoledgeable customer support across all these vendors’ technologies.
...a suitable analogy might be multiple passengers on a shared, low-cost shuttle bus, each telling the driver they have to be dropped off in a particular order, and the driver not knowing whose direction to take.
Net-net
HP’s ONE multivendor alliance program is a logical step in adding more data center value for their existing ProCurve customers. Customers, however, must beware as “the devil is in the details” and even more so in “the operational complexity” that can result from trying to take advantage of infrastructure and equipment consolidation without having the supporting IP service integration properly designed and innovated.
Posted by Mark Weiner at 09:58AM PST
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