Divorce is NOT looking Amicable….

Just 10 days before the dissolution of the longstanding agreement between HP and Cisco is completed, HP recently fired a loud shot across Cisco’s bow.

One week after closing the $2.7 billion acquisition of 3Com, HP announced on Monday that its newest “Cisco-free” data center takes advantage of HP/3Com equipment to “achieve twice the port and capacity density, and a 50 percent reduction in power consumption versus previous solutions.”

This shot is meant to alert Cisco of the direct competition between their solution and  Cisco’s Unified Computing System, which combines servers, storage, networking and virtualization technology into a single box.

States Ken Gray, HP Vice President in a recent press release: “We’re Cisco-free in this data center and have a plan to extend this freedom across all of our internal IT data centers next year.”

Ouch! Did he really need to use the word ‘freedom’?

It should also be noted that the HP solution is promised to be an open architecture, allowing interoperability with multiple vendors and conforming to industry standards.

Thank goodness there are not kids involved, I’m sure this shot was heard loud and clear in San Jose….