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Q&A: HP ProCurve CTO Paul Congdon: Page 5 of 12

Congdon: We have this tension right now, yes. We've spent the last 20 years decomposing that mainframe into a bunch of bits and parts, and now it's a bunch of virtual parts.

In the process of doing that, we've given customers a lot of choice about how they can deploy things. But the sprawl from that decomposition has created a management challenge. So we're trying to collapse back this disaggregated system into something that customers can manage at a higher level. It'll still be modular and virtualized. But it'll be a bigger building block.

We're competing for a new system, which is the data-center element, or whatever you want to call it. Is it a rack, is it a pod? Well, it's a disaggregated system that I now manage as more of a unit. We're fiercely competing to be the interface to customers, to provide that, and we need to do that in a way that's still going to give them choice and flexibility.

NetworkComputing: So that's what you're working on in the Data Center Bridging portion of the single converged fabric task force standards effort under the IEEE?

Congdon: Yes, that's absolutely one of the key motivations here. We recognize there's an ecosystem of people that need to be part of the solution. Hypervisors, NIC vendors, switch vendors, management software, and of course the storage and compute guys. All of these people are together putting the system together, and if we're going to have a chance of building something that gives customers more choice and flexibility, that's got to be based on open standards.