HP to Grid-Enable Entire Product Line

HP this week also announced it plans to buy Talking Blocks, a San Francisco-based Web services management company.

Hewlett-Packard Co. is adding to its Adaptive Enterprise strategy this week by announcing plans to grid-enable its entire product line and acquire a new company.

The Palo Alto, Calif., company already grid enables its PA-RISC, Integrity, Alpha and ProLiant server lines by incorporating the Globus Toolkit and OGSA (Open Grid Services Architecture) 2.0, according to Nick van der Zweep, director of utility computing in HPs Enterprise Systems Group.

Over the next 12 to 18 months, HP will integrate the Globus Toolkit as well as the next version of the OGSA standard, 3.0—which is due in October—into its entire line of consumer and commercial products, from handheld devices up to its largest servers, van der Zweep said.

"Everything that HP ships will be grid-enabled," he said.

In addition, HP is creating a specific consulting group within its HP Services unit to deal with grid-based platforms. The group will offer management, deployment and support of grid architectures, van der Zweep said.

Grid platforms fit well within HPs Adaptive Enterprise initiative, which is designed to virtualize IT resources to enable administrators to quickly allocate and deploy resources in response to business demands, he said. Grids enable IT administrators to turn most resources, from computers to Web services to storage and applications, into services, making them more easily accessible and manageable.

Grid-enabling its products is among several offerings that HP is making in this area. Already the company offers grid software infrastructure on top of its OpenView management platform, the Utility Data Center for virtualizing data center resources and SmartFrog—or Smart Framework for Object Groups—which enables administrators to configure distributed computing resources that are part of a grid.

In addition to the grid moves, HP this week announced it plans to buy Talking Blocks, a San Francisco-based Web services management company. The companys standards-based service-oriented architecture enables businesses to integrate disparate in-house systems and those of business partners, according to HP. It can also help connect Web and legacy services.

HP expects to complete the acquisition of the privately-held company later this month. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

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