Has HP Leaked Next Week’s Server Announcement?

HP may have accidentally leaked its own product announcement scheduled for next week in Las Vegas.

A search result on HP’s Website revealed the existence of 11 new servers named “HP ProLiant ML350p Gen8”, fuelling speculation that this is what the company will preview on Monday.

Inside leak

According to Channel Register, HP’s own search engine returned a number of products when the keyword ‘gen8’ was entered. Links were dead, but speeds and specs of the ProLiant G8 servers, powered by Intel’s “Sandy Bridge-EP” Xeon E5 processors, were revealed. One of the new servers will include HP’s latest networking, storage and management tools, according to the search results, although searches for “gen8” no longer yield this index of results.

Reportedly, the leaked information also suggested that HP would be coming out with a competitor to Cisco’s Unified Computer System (UCS). Cisco’s UCS features a server, storage and virtualisation (VMware).

The invite to the event described next week’s announcement as “one of the most important enterprise launches of the year” and stated that HP would debut “ground-breaking, new enterprise technology and services that redefine customer data centre experiences and economics.”

The event is due to be hosted by Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager of the Enterprise servers, storage, networking and technology services group at HP, and Mark Potter, senior vice president and general manager of the Industry Standard Servers and Software division, which is responsible for the ProLiant servers, is expected to be in attendance, adding strength to the rumours.

Last week, HP secured a victory over Oracle in their long running legal battle over the Itanium platform after a judge in California threw out Oracle’s claim that HP fraudulently concealed plans to hire Leo Apotheker as CEO. Despite the company’s renewed focus on the enterprise, it has suggested that the threat of consumerisation of technology is exaggerated.