HP and NEC have expanded a global alliance to collaborate on joint engineering for mission-critical and blade servers that they say will increase technology innovation, investment protection and solution choice for enterprise clients.
Since 1995, NEC and HP have been strategic alliance partners, focused on NEC’s role as a provider of large-scale, mission-critical enterprise IT systems built on HP’s Unix-based operating system, HP-UX.
Building on their successful collaborations on HP-UX, HP Integrity servers and NEC NX7700i servers, HP and NEC are extending their alliance to include next-generation, mission-critical x86 systems. These servers satisfy increased demands for maximum uptime driven by industry trends such as social, mobile, cloud and big data computing.
The expanded alliance will accelerate advancements across multiple mission-critical server platforms, including 'DragonHawk', HP’s future, scalable x86 infrastructure based on HP Superdome 2 and blade server technology.
HP and NEC also plan to increase worldwide delivery of joint solutions, providing clients with greater flexibility, a broader choice of solutions to match their specific enterprise needs and continued investment protection for mission-critical environments, consistent with HP Project Odyssey.
'Performance and reliability are vital to mission-critical computing clients and the business-critical workloads they will deploy into the next decade,' said Mark Potter, senior vice president and general manager, Servers, HP. 'By aligning our expertise, HP and NEC will drive enterprise server technology forward, allowing our joint clients to protect and grow their current and future investments.'
Shinichi Shoji, executive vice president at NEC, added: 'As computing demands continue to rise, our customers need access to the latest server technology on a shortened timetable with ease of deployment. Based on more than two decades of collaboration to meet the rising needs of mission-critical customers, NEC and HP are poised to combine our resources to provide additional functionality and bring innovative, high-quality offerings to market.'
