News release

HP Advances Grid Strategy for the Adaptive Enterprise

HP Systems to be Grid-enabled; Grid Services to Simplify Use, Management of Infrastructure Resources

HP (NYSE:HPQ) today announced plans to further enable its enterprise infrastructure technologies for grid computing. By leveraging open grid standards, HP plans to help customers simplify the use and management of distributed IT (information technology) resources. The initiative will integrate industry grid standards, including the Globus Toolkit and Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA), across HP's enterprise product lines.

HP also announced enterprise consulting within HP Services for grid-based platforms. HP Services will provide management, deployment and lifecycle support of grid architectures. HP's product and service plans extend the company's Adaptive Enterprise strategy to perfectly synchronize business and IT. Grid computing will enable enterprises to draw on IT resources anywhere in the world to meet their dynamic needs for computing resources.

Analysts have estimated grid software and services will become a $4 billion market by 2008, but HP expects the opportunity to be significantly larger as corporate IT departments embrace the grid.

"HP started developing grid-like infrastructures more than five years ago. Grid is an important piece of the HP Adaptive Enterprise strategy, where today, we see the shared computing vision soon turning into reality as commercial enterprises more aggressively seek the agility and cost benefits the grid affords," said Shane Robison, chief strategy and technology officer, HP. "The grid has the potential to solve real business problems by simplifying global access to enterprise computing services.

"For CIOs, the grid can help better synchronize business and technology demands in real time. To help realize that potential, HP has committed to grid-enable our IT systems. Over the next few years, this means products ranging from HP's smallest handhelds, printers and PCs to our most powerful storage arrays and supercomputers, will be able to connect with and serve as resources on the grid."

HP and the Grid

The "grid" concept was formally developed in the mid-1990s as a shared computing approach that coordinates decentralized resources and uses open, general-purpose protocols and interfaces to deliver high-quality service levels. The grid is designed to render almost anything in IT - computers, processing power, data, Web services, storage space, software applications, data files or devices - as a "grid service."

Today, HP delivers grid-enabled services, solutions and products to help enterprises better manage and capitalize on change. Taking advantage of and promoting heterogeneous environments and interoperability across devices, the offerings include:

• Enterprise Grid Consulting from HP Services: This new offering will allow customers to benefit from the expertise of HP Services when applying the concepts of grid computing to commercial environments.
  
  
• Grid Software Infrastructure: Building on the HP OpenView platform, HP is extending the capabilities of the software up through the management of Web services to deliver comprehensive real-time business process intelligence and enable immediate IT resource response in the context of Web services or grid services.
  
  
• HP Utility Data Center (UDC): The HP UDC delivers many grid capabilities to commercial customers today and is compatible with OGSA standards.
  
  
• Grid Resource Topology Designer: An innovation from HP Labs, this graphical user interface allows users to simply and easily "draw" resource needs, then submit the requirements to the grid for fulfillment. The Grid Resource Topology Designer, working with the HP UDC, automatically decides on the appropriate resources to deploy to fulfill the service-level request.
  
  
• Web Services Management Framework (WSMF): HP and its partners are formalizing this framework - a logical architecture for the management of resources, including grid and Web services. WSMF was recently submitted to the OASIS Web services Distributed Management Technical Committee as input into creating a standard management interface for all IT resources and services.
  
  
• SmartFrog: A technology developed by HP Labs, Smart Framework for Object Groups (SmartFrog) enables administrators to easily configure resources on the distributed computers that make up the grid.

HP Customers and Partners

HP also is working closely with key customers, researchers and standards organizations to help the grid evolve from a technology concept into something that offers real commercial value. This includes efforts to ensure the grid:

• is built on open standards;
• reduces complexity by enabling the management of grid services with easy-to-use standards and software;
• enables heterogeneous systems to communicate and collaborate better together;
• establishes trust by guaranteeing the security of participating systems and authentication of portable applications; and
• is truly robust, reliable and scalable.

HP customers and partners engaged in grid computing include:

• HP Supercomputer: HP and the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) are connecting a 11.8-teraflop HP supercomputer to the DOE science grid. When complete, the supercomputer will be the largest attached to a computer grid anywhere in the world.
  
  
• National Science Foundation TeraGrid: HP and Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) formed a strategic alliance to demonstrate the potential of the National Science Foundation's extensible TeraGrid. The TeraGrid will provide the nation's fastest and most powerful computing grid, with the goal of demonstrating key grid services by 2004.
  
  
• Gelato Federation: HP formed this group to focus on enabling open source Linux-based Intelâ Itaniumâ Processor Family computing solutions for academic, government and industrial research. The federation is developing scalable, commodity software to enable researchers to advance studies in developing and technology-intensive areas, such as life sciences and physical sciences.
  
  
• Ongoing Collaborations: In addition to PNNL and PSC, HP has ongoing relationships with key organizations dedicated to making grid commercially viable, including CERN, the open lab for data grid applications and BIRN, the Biomedical Informatics Research Network, where HP systems are in use today for grid-based life sciences research.
  
  
• Technical Partnerships: HP has engaged with key partners, including Avaki and Platform Computing, to advance grid in the enterprise market.

Additional information about HP's enterprise grid initiative is available at http://www.hp.com/techservers/grid/index.html.

About HP

HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, personal computing and access devices, global services and imaging and printing for consumers, enterprises and small and medium businesses. For the last four quarters, HP revenue totaled $71.8 billion. More information about HP is available at http://www.hp.com.

This news release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include the possibility that the market for the sale of certain products and services may not develop as expected; that development and performance of these products and services may not proceed as planned; and other risks that are described from time to time in HP's Securities and Exchange Commission reports, including but not limited to HP's annual report for the fiscal year ended October 31, 2002 and subsequently filed reports, including its quarterly report for the fiscal quarter ended April 30, 2003. If any of these risks or uncertainties materializes or any of these assumptions proves incorrect, HP's results could differ materially from HP's expectations in these statements.