It’s now an open secret that Hewlett-Packard is girding up its loins to compete with its long time partner Cisco. With the launch of its ProCurve Open Network Ecosystem and the introduction five new ProCurve data center switches on Monday, Hewlett-Packard has made its intentions clear that it is all set to take on Cisco.

Hewlett-Packard is aiming to make its expansion in the $50 billion U.S. server market and to intrude into the networking arenas that have long been dominated by Cisco Systems. According to reports, H-P decided to take this track after reports came out that Cisco is planning to expand into the blade server market later this year

On 26 Jan, H-P announced a number of vendors, which have already got into deals with the company to offer network applications and services compatible with the HP ProCure ONE Services zl Module – an HP blade for the HP ProCurve Switch 5400zl and 8200zl series. The vendors that have got into deal with the company include Aastra, AirTight Networks, Avaya, Erkhau, F5, InMon, Microsoft, McAfee and Riverbed. Teaming up with these vendors, H-P aims to offer improved network applications’ efficiency through reduced costs via operational streamlining.

Announcing HP ProCurve ONE, the general manager of HP ProCurve, Marius Haas said, "The kind of depth and breadth of coverage that we have at HP is something that outweighs anything that has presented itself in the networking space as a true alternative to what Cisco provides.”

Meanwhile, Cisco, adding 3 new Nexus data center switches, on Tuesday, promised that the company will grow to be a $14 billion data center hardware and services business in a couple of years.