News release

HP Ships Storage Management Software that Further Integrates Recently Acquired AppIQ Technology

Company outlines roadmap for server and storage management offering

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HP today announced that it is shipping the next generation of its storage management software for heterogeneous IT environments.

HP Storage Essentials 5.0 further incorporates the technology of AppIQ, which HP officially acquired on Oct. 24. Storage Essentials is a key part of the company's strategy to seamlessly unify server and storage management while also integrating HP's management software offerings.

Further advancing this strategy, HP unveiled the roadmap for its unified infrastructure management platform, which will enable customers to simplify their environments and reduce the operational costs associated with IT management.

"Customers demand a fully integrated platform for managing their servers and storage together, and Storage Essentials 5.0 is the next step in our long-term strategy to meet that demand," said Frank Harbist, vice president and general manager, ILM and StorageWorks Software, HP. "HP's plans for 2006 call for a number of additional strategic investments in areas such as HP OpenView integrations, multi-vendor backup and NAS filer management, and cluster and virtual systems management."

Storage Essentials is built on the latest open standards, including DMTF-CIM, SMI-S and J2EE, and integrates with HP Systems Insight Manager (SIM) software, the foundation for HP's unified infrastructure management strategy.

Base HP SIM server features can be extended by simply adding one or more HP ProLiant Essentials, HP Integrity or HP Storage Essentials plug-ins, all of which are members of HP's flexible and extensible family of products designed to help customers manage their server and storage infrastructure simultaneously from the same application interface.

Customers working towards unified management

Server network issues can lead to application performance bottlenecks and affect the performance of customers' storage networks. The tight integration between server and storage management is essential in enabling customers to synchronize business processes with their IT.

By providing customers with an open, standards-based management solution for servers and storage, HP is paving the way for customers such as Exempla Healthcare to automate and consolidate the management of their heterogeneous infrastructures.

Exempla Healthcare is a not-for-profit organization that includes three hospitals with more than 6,000 employees. Exempla was faced with managing 20 to 30 gigabytes of growth per day in its storage network and needed to provide its IT administrators with more insight into their IT infrastructure as well as better visibility of storage use for non-administrators.

Exempla chose HP Storage Essentials to help it address these issues and ensure that business-critical patient data was secure and always available, and that mission-critical business software such as Oracle®, Microsoft® SQL and Microsoft Exchange were protected from power outages, major interruption or a disaster.

"Informed provisioning decisions and a holistic view of our infrastructure help us monitor critical systems and ensure 24x7 uptime," said Jeff Hill, systems and storage administrator, Exempla. "HP Storage Essentials allows us to single-handedly manage our entire 160 terabyte storage network across three sites from a single pane of glass. A unified view of servers and storage reduces the confusion of having to manually report different sources of information and will improve our ability to troubleshoot potential network bottlenecks, and ultimately enable us to provide better patient care."

HP roadmap for customers

With the explosive growth of data, storage networks are a critical part of the enterprise infrastructure. Unlike other vendors who can only offer siloed management solutions for server and storage networks, HP is working to cut complexity and improve operational efficiency by delivering truly unified infrastructure management. The newly acquired AppIQ technology is expected to accelerate the execution of this strategy.

Over the next six to 12 months, HP plans to continue to enhance support for heterogeneous infrastructures and leverage the new technology into automation enablement technology for HP BladeSystem environments as well as cluster virtualization, grid management and enhanced reporting tools.

HP plans to invest in a number of strategic storage-related areas designed to further accelerate the growth of the company's software business and keep pace with operational challenges facing IT management.

Leveraging current investments in unified HP SIM and Storage Essentials, HP plans to offer integrations into HP management solutions. These deep, smart plug-in integrations will be designed to ensure that the administration of server and storage infrastructure can be centralized into enterprise-wide IT business operation services such as help desk, service level agreements and global asset management.

In addition, HP plans to meet customers' expectations for consolidated, interoperable, heterogeneous infrastructure management tools by expanding heterogeneous storage ecosystem support, offering new features such as cluster visualization and reporting, Tru64 and OpenVMS systems, backup reporting, network-attached storage management integration, tape management integration and iSCSI reporting.

More information about Storage Essentials 5.0 is available at http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storage/software/esuite/index.html.

More information about HP StorageWorks offerings is available at www.hp.com/go/storageworks/.

About HP

HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, global services, business and home computing, and imaging and printing. For the four fiscal quarters ended July 31, 2005, HP revenue totaled $85.2 billion. More information about HP (NYSE, Nasdaq: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com.

Oracle is a registered U.S. trademark of Oracle Corp., Redwood City, Calif. Microsoft is a U.S. registered trademark of Microsoft Corp.

This news release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions that, if they ever materialize or prove incorrect, could cause the results of HP and its consolidated subsidiaries to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including the expected development, performance or rankings of products or services; statements of expectation or belief; and any statement of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include the development, performance and market acceptance of products and services 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 Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended July 31, 2005, and other reports filed after HP's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended Oct. 31, 2004. HP assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements.