Hewlett-Packard launched its counterattack against Cisco's move into the server market late Tuesday when it announced that David Donatelli, president of EMC's storage division, will join HP on May 5 as executive vice president for enterprise servers, storage, and networking. EMC named Frank M. Hauck, executive vice president for global marketing and customer quality, to head up its storage division and quickly removed Donatelli from the list of executives on the company's Website.
Cisco in March announced plans to expand its data center offerings and begin selling blade servers, putting it in competition with server partners like HP, Dell, and IBM. Cisco is partnering with storage vendors like EMC and NetApp to offer a full menu of data center infrastructure systems.
That move by Cisco set the stage for what industry analysts said would be a major battle among large infrastructure vendors looking to sell packages of servers, storage, and networking systems to large enterprises. The recent announcement by Oracle that it will buy Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion seems to add another competitor to the fray.
HP said Donatelli will report to Ann Livermore, executive vice president of the Technology Solutions Group at HP. At EMC, Donatelli reported to Joe Tucci, the company's chairman, president, and CEO. HP also said it was adding its ProCurve Networking business to Donatellis portfolio. Marius Haas, senior vice president and worldwide general manager of HP ProCurve, will report to Donatelli.
HP said in a statement, "As the future of computing moves toward converged platforms of servers, storage and networking, this combination accelerates the drive for efficiency and innovation, as well as increases the value customers receive from HP's infrastructure solutions."
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