HP-Compaq chip away at to-do list

Hewlett-Packard says that while most of its efforts have been in wrapping up the administrative details of the $19 billion acquisition of Compaq, progress is being made toward integrating products and co-developing technologies.

So far the company has merged 229,000 mailboxes, networked 1,193 sites and claims it will save as much as $800 million by combining its procurement and supply chains. Company officials say as many as 7,000 applications will be killed and as many as 15,000 employees laid off. Aside from these details, however, how much product integration is going on, and what can users look forward to?

Analysts say that while there are some initial signs of product integration, there ultimately will need to be more for the acquisition to be successful.

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"They're still in the first three months of this thing, so in some ways the kind of moves HP has been doing are the ones you would expect, says Charles King, senior analyst with the Sageza Group. "They need to walk a tightrope between continuing to support their own and Compaq's products at the same time as they are planning changes for the future."

King says two prominent examples show the companies are moving forward.

"The [storage management] API swap with EMC is a good example of the sort of thing we will probably see more of," King says. "Another is the merger of the companies' directions on Itanium."

On the day the acquisition became final - May 7 - the company released road maps for all its products, detailing which products they would keep and which they would cancel.

Part of those road maps pertained to servers. According to the road maps, HP will discontinue its Netserver products next month in favor of ProLiant servers; it will port its PA-RISC, Alpha and MIPS servers to Intel's 64-bit Itanium processor over time. The company will keep both high-end Tandem and Superdome servers.

Serve it up

"I would expect [at the] end of October-November rolling out to the end of HP's fiscal year to begin to see the first servers re-engineered by the dual staffs," says Peter Kastner, chief research officer for Aberdeen Group.

One example might be the two eight-way ProLiant servers HP plans to announce in the first half of next year. These servers will use the HP F8 chipset and the Intel Xeon MP processor and be available in 4U (7-inch) high and 7U (12.25-inch) high chassis'. According to HP, they will be faster than other eight-processor Intel boxes. They have hot-plug RAID and an in-chassis upgrade option available.

According to Karl Walker, CTO for Industry Standard Servers at HP, the company will use InfiniBand router products to cluster servers. It will pursue PCI Express in workstations first and servers later. PCI Express, an I/O technology that is faster than PCI but backward-compatible, can be used to speed intraprocessor chip-to-chip transfers of data or as adapters that can fit in a server and bridge to InfiniBand, Gigabit Ethernet or iSCSI.

HP also will expand its Industry Standard blade offerings with two- and four-processor blades based on full-powered Pentium III and Xeon DP processors this fall and the beginning of next year.

HP's Itanium teams also are working together on the company's two- to 64-processor servers. They introduced two servers based on the Itanium chipset last month.

Meanwhile, HP has worked slowly on merging its storage hardware and software.

A place to put stuff

The company road map calls for continuing Compaq's midrange StorageWorks products and keeping its high-end XP series arrays, and for merging storage software under the OpenView name. It also calls for building products that fit in its Utility Data Center scheme, which lets data centers be provisioned and reconfigured on-the-fly.

"So far the product road map I've seen is sensible - in fact, it is downright smart," says Steve Duplessie, senior analyst for the Enterprise Storage Group consultancy.

This month HP amended an agreement that Compaq and EMC had signed in November to exchange management APIs so they could manage each other's storage arrays. They added HP's high-end XP arrays and its Virtual Arrays and a bunch of software to the list of products that will benefit from the exchange.

With the new agreement EMC also will use HP management APIs in its PowerPath, Widesky middleware and Remote Support Concentrator. HP will use EMC APIs in its OpenView Storage Area Manager, Utility Data Center Utility Controller and SureStore SAN Master products, among other products.

"The major benefit [of the API swap] is a single management domain," says Mattias Ress, senior IT storage architect for T-Systems AG, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telecom in Bonn, Germany.

Michelle Weiss, worldwide head of marketing for HP storage products, says that virtualization - the grouping of storage into a common pool - is another area where users will first see co-developed products. Analysts say the first products in this space will appear in the next 18 to 24 months as virtualization is incorporated into HP's Enterprise Virtual Array.

"One key to virtualizing the storage management is that I can change storage vendors without changing my storage management environment," Ress says.

Sources also say the company is expected to make announcements this fall regarding iSCSI, most likely as products that use it as a gateway technology to Fibre Channel arrays.

HP's Walker says PCI Express is in the company's plans - first as a higher-speed bus in workstations and later in servers. So is incorporating Serial ATA (SATA) drives for low-cost bulk storage and Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) for performance and reliability in mission-critical applications. SATA drives will appear first in workstations and desktop PCs, later in servers as direct-attached storage (DAS). SAS only will be used as DAS in mainstream servers.

Switch fanatics

As for switches, HP was the only vendor of the two companies that made Ethernet switches. Switch manufacturing will continue at a new level. According to Brice Clark, director of strategy for the HP ProCurve Networking Business, the unit says it will take over the No. 2 position in the market in 2003.

Analysts say that goal is ambitious.

"The last 12-months' revenues are $1.4 billion for 3Com and under half-a-billion for HP ProCurve," says Bob Sutherland, an analyst with Technology Business Research. "Even though HP has a long way to go, I don't see them surpassing 3Com unless 3Com is really hurt."

After all, Sutherland says the Compaq side of the house has practically assured that ProCurve won't take the No. 2 post. The company has 1,000 certified Cisco engineers and 4,500 experienced Cisco engineers. "That doesn't look good if they are trying to sell ProCurve," he says.

Cisco is the leader in network switching, followed by Nortel, Enterasys Networks, 3Com and Extreme Networks, Dell'Oro Group says.

Figures released by Dell'Oro show that HP moved into third place in the Layer 2 10/100M Ethernet switch market for the second quarter of 2001.

The company's 10/100M bit/sec switches account for about 60% of the overall Ethernet market in terms of revenue.

Clark says the company will introduce more switches for enterprise-size businesses in the next 18 months.

OS-sification?

On the operating system front, HP introduced a version of HP-UX 11i in June; Compaq launched a new release of OpenVMS. They will migrate MPE-ix and Tru64 Unix users to HP-UX and retain the NonStop and OpenVMS operating systems.

Users hope this merging of teams works out, especially as it relates to moving OpenVMS to Itanium platform.

"OpenVMS has amazing clustering, is highly reliable, very secure and has the Apache Web server and every compiler users could ever want," says John Eisenschmidt, a systems analyst for the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington. "If the migration of OpenVMS to Itanium is done correctly it will work out well."

The companies are sticking to their road maps, which say that HP-UX over time will take on clustering and file system enhancements of Tru64 Unix. HP claims that work has begun.

"There are a number of areas already where we are integrating the teams," says Rich Marcello, vice president and general manager of HP's AlphaServer division.

"For example, we are taking our TruCluster team, which was working on Tru64 Unix previously, and integrating that with the HP-UX team. We are developing TruCluster technology on HP-UX," Marcello adds.

Linux is another area where integration needs to take place. According to Martin Fink, general manager of the HP Linux Systems Division, little has been done to integrate HP's and Compaq's Linux teams because they have parallel goals - to create products on the low-end that run on Red Hat and SuSE Linux. Only in the technical computing arena will Linux on Alpha servers survive.

Fink says that before year-end, users should expect HP to announce a Linux version of fault-tolerant, clustering software, MC/ServiceGuard for ProLiant servers.

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