HP partners with F5

network and application management product sets, the two companies confirmed, CRN reports.

Specifically, HP will market its Virtual Application Network offerings, which leverage software-defined networking technologies such as OpenFlow, with F5 application delivery network (ADN) products as part of validated packages, including for Microsoft Exchange 2010, server virtualisation and disaster recovery deployments.

The combined platform will offer a series of plug-ins and configuration tools, which allow administrators to create profiles and policies for both configuring virtual servers and incorporating them into the network, V3 writes.

HP networking director of marketing Kash Shaikh told V3 the platform would eliminate the need to manually configure settings when deploying a virtual machine, such as the command line interface network configurations, which can add up to as many as 250 000 entries per data centre network.

Industry analysts are impressed with the potential, PC Advisor reports.

"Its right on target," said Andre Kindness, enterprise networking analyst at Forrester Research. The switching and routing layers (Levels 2 to 4) need to work with application acceleration technologies for cloud computing, he said.

"Applications have to be accelerated and balanced, and you have to use the layer 2 environment to do some of that. For data centres to be automated, those pieces need to work in harmony."

Mark Fabbi, a VP of research at Gartner, said that only a few vendors are trying to do this. "By partnering with F5, HP gets a long way there."