Mayer added that acceptance of HP's new 5900 top-of-rack 10G data center switch has been positive globally. The 24- to 48-port switch with 40G uplinks debuted last fall, filling what had been a significant gap in HP's data center switching portfolio.
Gillai said the 5900 will soon receive software enhancements that enable it to "operate in an interesting fashion" with HP servers.
"We have bigger plans for some of the features that will be on that platform, in terms of how we continue evolving our Converged Infrastructure," he said, without going into specifics, though suggesting that HP's Virtual Connect technology could be an example of how it plays out.
Virtual Connect is designed to automate the process of connecting servers to networks and storage. Enterprises can reconfigure connections to LANs and storage-area networks by, for example, moving workloads or adding and replacing servers on the fly.
In the data center core, HP is in no rush to add TRILL to its 12500 switch. TRILL is an IETF specification for multipath Ethernet forwarding in data center and cloud fabric architectures.
Seven months ago, HP added the capability to bind four of the switches together into a single logical unit with its Intelligent Resilient Framework (IRF) technology so customers, like DreamWorks Animation, have been satisfied with that.
"We said we were going to implement (TRILL) this year, and that continues to be the plan," Mayer said. "But I would also say that IRF is pretty extensible and so we just haven't had people turning this down because we don't have TRILL."
The 5900 is also designed to support TRILL.
Also coming, perhaps this year, for the 12500 are 40G Ethernet ports. Further down the road are 100G Ethernet links but HP's in no hurry if the demand is not there, even though competitor Huawei is showing a switch at Interop it says is capable of supporting 96 100G ports.
"We don't need bragging rights for 100G, we have customers," Gillai said. "I could use it for a switch interconnect but it's a very expensive port for an interconnect."
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