HP teamed up with NEC to develop next generation x86 high-end servers and web apps

"Sadie Network News" July 23, according to foreign media reports, Hewlett-Packard and Japan Electric Shares (NEC) will expand their existing partnership, is about to jointly develop x86-based high-end server and Web applications. The two companies said July 18 they will work together to accelerate research into HP's next-generation blade server system, which is gradually introducing the service to the market with an Itanium UNIX server. They say the focus will be on creating x86 hardware with the same reliability as UNIX products, which can be used as mission-critical roles in today's social networks, mobile apps, and cloud servers. HP is trying to catch up with its rival Amazon's cloud computing services WS in the growing cloud services market, but at the same time maintaining the competitiveness of hardware products from a largely shifting UNIX environment. Hewlett-Packard last year announced a strategy to develop a hybrid cloud scheme, a solution based on HP's Converged cloud service (HP converged Cloud). The company last month unveiled a new operating system for cloud computing, the HP Cloud OS (Cloud OS), built on OpenStack. HP says the new operating system will only run on its own hardware products. The new partnership with NEC will accelerate the progress of HP's Odyssey Project Odyssey, which aims to try to consolidate x86 servers with Itanium UNIX servers. NEC said the two sides will be particularly focused on the Dragonhawk system that HP has been developing for several years, and the system should be able to combine two types of servers, but progress towards this goal has been slow. It is reported that HP and NEC first cooperated in 1995 to provide a system based on the HP UNIX solution. NEC also tried to expand its cloud offerings to compete with Fujitsu (Fujitsu), which has close cooperation with HP's rival Oracle in the area of server hardware. HP has been trying to reverse the impact of the overall decline in the PC market, and its server business is trying to adjust to the growth of cloud services. In its May earnings, Hewlett-Packard reported a 32% drop in second-quarter profits last year, linked to a sharp drop in sales from its PC division and Business Server sector.