Its official: The ProCurve and 3Com brands will go away, to instead come under the umbrella of "HP Networking." The H3C brand will be retained however, which probably comes as no surprise since it has done very well in China. Noting that there is "very little product overlap," the company has said that it has no current plans to kill off any existing HP or 3Com networking products.

As reported by Network World, the HP Networking portfolio will now combine "HP ProCurve LAN edge products with 3Com's routing, security, data center and enterprise campus core switching solutions" into four broad series of products. These sub-brands will be known as the A Series, E Series, V Series and S Series respectively.

According to HP EVP and general manager for enterprise servers, storage and networking David Donatelli, the A Series is for large enterprises while the E series is for mid-sized companies; the ProCurve brand and 3Com brand will be folded into the former and latter series of products respectively.

The S Series is catered to customers with security needs, and would be where TippingPoint intrusion-prevention products will be featured; the V series is designated for products targeted at small and mid-sized businesses.

In addition, HP is moving fast to make its stand known where partner-turned-rival networking giant Cisco is concerned. In a press release on Monday, the company unveiled a new data center located near Houston. Consisting of some 34 core routers from 3Com, four TippingPoint intrusion detection and protection devices, and upwards of 300 HP ProCurve network switches, HP was quick to point out that the data center to be, "Cisco-free."

For more on this story:
- check out the article at The Register
- check out the article at ChannelWeb
- check out the article at Network World 

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