HP finishes Cisco cleansing six months early

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 28 September 2010 13:07

IT Industry - Strategy

HP has completed a project aimed at replacing Cisco equipment in its data centres well ahead of schedule.

Back in April, HP announced plans to remove Cisco networking equipment from all six of its internal data centres within a year. That project has been completed within six months.

All of the non-HP WAN equipment connecting the six data centres - two in each of Houston, Austin and Atlanta - to each other and to the Internet has been replaced and additional HP switches and routers installed with no data centre downtime, company officials claimed.

"This past April we said we'd be Cisco-free for core WAN routing and switching in our data centres, and we are. We did it ahead of schedule and are seeing performance even better than we expected," said Ken Gray, vice president, infrastructure at HP's global information technology unit.

"Our engineers have done a great job proving it's possible to run a network for a company the size and scale of HP on our own products, and we did the migration without taking a data centre offline," he added.

HP now plans to install its own equipment at company facilities around the world.

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