HP Introduces Innovations to Drive Mainstream Adoption of Virtualization; New Software and Services Help Businesses Reduce Costs, Increase Agility and Simplify Management of Virtual IT.

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- HP (NYSE:HPQ) (Nasdaq:HPQ) today announced innovations that simplify the management of virtual servers and speed implementation of virtualized environments.

The new HP software and services are part of the industry's most complete portfolio of virtualization offerings, which help business customers optimize their data centers by pooling and sharing IT resources to substantially reduce costs and increase their responsiveness to change.

"HP continues to demonstrate its leadership in delivering virtualization solutions," said Vernon Turner, group vice president, IDC. "With this announcement, HP is delivering breakthrough integration that simplifies the management of virtualized environments and is propelling the mainstream adoption of virtualization technologies."

Introductions include:

--Expansion of the multi-operating system HP Virtual Server Environment for HP Integrity servers,

--New HP-UX 11i mission-critical virtualization capabilities,

--Accelerated availability of OpenVMS on virtualized Integrity servers,

--A new packaged solution with VMware and HP ProLiant Essentials Virtualization Management software, and

--A new network consolidation service.

"Virtualization has become a hot-button issue for enterprise customers and is at the heart of HP's Adaptive Enterprise strategy to synchronize business and IT to capitalize on change," said Scott Stallard, executive vice president, Enterprise Storage and Servers, HP. "Today's expansion of our leading virtualization portfolio meets customer demands to increase IT utilization while enabling them to adapt to the changing demands of their businesses."

Simplifying management of multi-OS virtual servers

With its new and expanded HP Integrity Essentials software products, HP offers customers the industry's first and most robust integrated software family for planning, managing and automating virtual servers.

The new software is part of the HP Virtual Server Environment for HP Integrity and HP 9000 servers. The offerings enable enterprises to achieve a greater return on their IT investments by optimizing server resource utilization in real time based on business priorities. From a single console, IT administrators can now:

--Plan and simulate the placement of application workloads with the industry's first intuitive, integrated tool for capacity planning -- the new HP Integrity Essentials Capacity Advisor;

--Configure and manage all types of virtual and physical server resources from a single management console with the industry's first comprehensive, easy-to-use virtualization management software -- the new HP Integrity Essentials Virtualization Manager;

--Automate the allocation of server resources to applications based on business priorities. Already available for HP-UX 11i and Linux, HP Integrity Essentials Global Workload Manager is now extended to support OpenVMS on HP Integrity servers.

HP also announced that HP Integrity Virtual Machines, which allows multiple operating system instances to share a single CPU as well as I/O resources, is expected to be available later this year for HP-UX 11i. Support for Microsoft Windows(R) Server 2003 as well as Linux is planned for 2006.

HP Integrity Virtual Machines are an integral part of the HP Virtual Server Environment and are integrated with HP Integrity Essentials software.

"Server virtualization capabilities are becoming increasingly important for buyers of enterprise servers," said Tom Kucharvy, president and chief research officer, Summit Strategies. "In fact, more than 70 percent of enterprises have indicated that they already have or plan to purchase server virtualization solutions within the next three years."

With the HP Virtual Server Environment for Integrity servers, HP delivers the industry's most flexible multi-OS platform, supporting HP-UX 11i, Windows, OpenVMS and Linux on a highly reliable and scalable server family with a common set of virtualization, management and automation tools.

"Virtualization enables customers to vastly improve resource utilization, IT efficiency and cost savings, which is why we want to make the benefits of server virtualization readily available to Microsoft customers," said Bob Muglia, senior vice president, Microsoft Windows Server. "HP's commitment to support Windows Server on HP Integrity Virtual Machines is an important step in bringing virtualization capabilities to enterprise customers who need to consolidate mission-critical, heterogeneous systems."

The new HP Integrity Essentials software plugs into HP Systems Insight Manager 5.0 to deliver unified infrastructure management of virtual and physical systems for HP Integrity and HP ProLiant servers. This approach improves ease of use and lowers costs for IT organizations looking to implement a more flexible infrastructure and automate more of its IT processes.

More information on the HP Virtual Server Environment is available at www.hp.com/go/vse.

Advancing mission-critical virtualization for HP-UX 11i and OpenVMS

HP also announced enhancements to its software offerings for the HP-UX 11i operating system to deliver the industry's only UNIX(R)-based mission-critical virtualization platform. Enhancements include:

--The new HP-UX 11i Virtualization Licensing Program, which allows customers to reduce total cost of ownership by licensing software for virtual machines and partitions rather than a full server;

--The new HP Serviceguard Storage Management Suite for HP-UX11i, which enhances the data management, performance and cluster manageability of HP-UX 11i;

--Enhancements to HP Instant Capacity for Integrity and HP 9000 servers, which streamlines HP-UX 11i customers' ability to access additional server capacity when needed.

"HP Virtual Server Environment for HP-UX allows us to maximize the use of our computer resources, while gaining the flexibility to move resources around rapidly in response to changing business needs," said David Grant, data center manager for Canadian network communications company Mitel. "We also have a higher level of availability and resilience with an overall increase in performance and with a lower total cost of ownership."

More information on HP-UX 11i's virtualization enhancements is available at www.hp.com/go/hpux11i.

OpenVMS is now available on the entire line of standards-based HP Integrity servers with support for mixed architecture clusters up to as many as 96 nodes on HP Integrity servers, AlphaServer systems or a combination of both. More information on OpenVMS is available at www.hp.com/go/openvms.

HP and VMware to offer customers an industry first

HP and VMware are working together to introduce the first packaged solution that combines VMware virtual infrastructure software with advanced physical and virtual server management from HP. VMware with HP ProLiant Essentials Virtualization Management software helps reduce the time and costs associated with implementing and managing virtual machines and will accelerate their use in production environments.

HP has also updated the HP ProLiant Essentials Virtual Machine Management Pack and the Server Migration Pack to integrate with and complement VMware management capabilities, including links to VMotion technology for non-disruptive migration of virtual machines, transfer of virtual machines to an alternative host in the event of a failure, and migration from a virtual machine environment to a physical server environment.

More information on the new ProLiant Essentials Virtualization Management software is available at www.hp.com/servers/proliantessentials.

Collaborative services lay the foundation for a secure, virtualized network

HP is also leveraging its data center networking expertise, which spans infrastructure, security, middleware communication and application data flows, to create a new network consolidation solution for its customers.

The HP Network Consolidation Solution optimizes data center interconnectivity, LAN/WAN infrastructure, application performance and network security to lay the foundation for a secure, virtualized network.

More information on this solution is available at www.hp.com/go/networks.

More information about HP's virtualization strategy and all the offerings above is available in an online press kit at www.hp.com/go/HPVirtualization2005.

About HP

HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, global services, business and home computing, and imaging and printing. For the four fiscal quarters ended July 31, 2005, HP revenue totaled $85.2 billion. More information about HP is available at www.hp.com.

Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corp. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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