HP's & Fortinet's solution

Hi everybody.

Considering that we pretend to solve the practical case applying HP's solutions for servers and LANs and Fortinet's for security it is of interest to analyze what they have to offer on those areas.

If we take a look at HP Enterprise we can see their entire portfolio from products to services or solutions. We are going to foccus on their products since our focus is on building a datacenter of our own.

HP's servers solutions offer consists of the following categories:

With this offer portfolio we can see how they can cover almost every scenario we could think of. From enrackable + blade servers or tower servers to fully integrated systemsl This wide offer hugely benefits us since it allows to be pretty creative on how we desing our solution.

A very interesting feature to higlight from HP's offer is that they've got a DC/OS available for their solutions, Mesosphere , which is a huge enabler for the implementation of hybrid solutions which are transparent to the application level.

Regarding HP's network solutions we can extract from their portfolio the following offer:

This is a very basic offer since they only offer switches and routers + access points ( which we do not really need for a CDP ). The other ones can be usefull to implement the CDP network and with routers and switches we've got more than enough considering the actual trend. Nowadays, the solutions are evolving through the concepts of SDN (Software Defined Networks) and NFV (Network Function Virtualization) which enable for the deployment of networks with complicated requirements through the virtualization of a huge part of the functions needed. At the end, following this line of thought, we would only need equipment to physically interconnect all the devices on the CPD and all other network logic could be implemented in a virtual manner.

It is also interesting to highlight their focus on network security and management through their monitoring tools which are very user-friendly and as a first impression seem pretty complete.

For last, the better, the security options that we've got on deck, courtesy of Fortinet.

Fortinet, highly advertises their security solutions as a whole and how their solutions collaborate and share data across each other to achieve a better overall security.

This picture clearly states all the intra relations between all the network components and security applications. Therefore Fortinet seems to offer a very complete and competitive portfolio of solutions it remains to be seen if their solutions can easily fit in a highly virtualized environment as it would be the goal of the final implementation.

With this reflection we close today's post and we look forward to developing on the topics exposed today.

See you soon.