Just one day after Cisco and EMC's love-in with VMware, HP is going to answer that blast with one of its own, one with integrated components from just one company and not three.

According to an early report, which has appeared before HP's announcement, HP is announcing an Infrastructure Operating Environment which puts apps and processes into standardised shared environments. There is also an HP Flex Fabric which provides a single low-latency and high-performance network fabric that is said to be highly scalable and converges multiple protocols. We guess this is code for Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).

The storage side of this is said by someone who usually knows this stuff to involve three products or product groups.

The IBRIX acquisition pops up as the StorageWorks X9000 Network Storage Systems Family. The X9300 is a NAS head, the X9320 is an appliance, constituting the head plus SAS and SATA hard drives, and there is a high-end X9720 box. The three products can inhabit the same global namespace and data can be dynamically moved between nodes.

There is a StorageWorks SAN Virtualisation Services Platform, which uses OEM'd LSI software and provides functionality somewhat similar to IBM's SAN Volume Controller. (SVC). This will pool block-access storage resources.

The third storage product is StorageWorks Cluster Extension EVA Software For MS Hyper-V Live Migration. The long name means the thing provides Live Migration, an equivalent of VMware's VMotion.

This whole HP shebang is aimed at the cloud and we'll cover the announcement in more depth later today. ®

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