Guild Companies--HP to Resell RadiSys Carrier-Grade Servers to Telecoms and SPs

Hewlett Packard announced last week that it has tapped specialist hardware maker RadiSys to supply it with a line of rack-mounted blade servers that adhere to the myriad standards developed by the telecommunications and service provider industries. While HP has a substantial business selling PA-RISC Unix servers into the telecommunications and service provider markets, it does not have a carrier-grade Linux-on-Intel line that meets industry standards.

The servers that telecoms and service providers need are different from the typical enterprise servers that HP sells under its ProLiant and Integrity brands. There are different form factors, peripherals, and features that are necessary. Moreover, telecoms and service provider customers typically want to deploy a server technology for 10 years, which is a long time in the commercial computer business. While there is good money to be made in this market--particularly for software and services--there is not enough server money for HP to engineer every possible kind of server these customers might need. To that end, HP has decided to partner with RadiSys rather than compete with it.

The telecommunications and service provider industries like the Compact PCI blade server standard, which has a different form factor and interconnect than the proprietary commercial blade servers that IBM, HP, Dell, and Sun Microsystems have announced. (Sun has a big cPCI line of machines, however, and has for five years.) HP launched its "Powerbar" blade servers, based on the cPCI standard, in December 2001. The initial blades for the chassis used 32-bit Intel Pentium III processors, but HP promised it would deliver blades running its own 64-bit PA-RISC chips and Intel's 64-bit Itanium chips. In the wake of the HP-Compaq merger, the Powerbar was quietly killed off in favor of the "Quickblade" ProLiant BL line. While the ProLiant BLs are popular among enterprise customers who want X86 processors and dense packaging, they do not adhere to the cPCI and PICMG 2.16 standards that the telecommunications industry has adopted for the manufacturing of switching systems and that service providers also adhere to as they roll out services on platforms.

HP has been in the telecoms market for 25 years, which is pretty much when it got into the server business. HP's Unix kit has been very popular among telecoms and service providers for back office systems that do billing, for instance, and it has a respectable business selling NEBS-compliant, DC-powered variants of its servers to these customers. HP and RadiSys have a little history, too. The two companies had inked an agreement in May 2002 to use a RadiSys cPCI board in the Powerbar servers.

Under this agreement with RadiSys, according to Greg Moulder, manager of solutions for the Network Service Provider group at HP, the company will resell Intel-based blade servers and rack-mounted servers designed and manufactured by RadiSys and specifically aimed at running the carrier-grade implementations of Linux from Red Hat, SuSE, and MontaVista Software. HP will also be able to resell custom servers to customers who have specific needs that are not met by the off-the-shelf components made by RadiSys.

Having the right hardware to peddle to telcommunications and service provider customers will help HP attain its true objectives, which are to sell more software and services into the this market and thereby take market share away from Sun, IBM, and a number of other specialist players. HP wants to sell its OpenCall SS7 and voice-over-IP software as well as a variant of the OpenView systems management software tweaked for the telecom space (called OpenView TEMIP) to customers in this market. Having the right hardware helps make it possible to go with an all-HP solution. HP also hopes to peddle engineering and life cycle management services to these customers.