Hewlett-Packard made the most out of its Interop conference last week. The hardware behemoth introduced a set of software-defined networking solutions that offer extended support for OpenFlow and bandwidth intensive technologies such as Hadoop.

The most notable product that made its debut at the Las Vegas event is the FlexFabric 11908, which HP refers to as the industry’s first OpenFlow-enabled aggregation switch. It delivers 10/40 GbE connectivity for blade servers and improves the performance of virtualization applications by as much as 50 percent. Among the other recent additions to the vendor’s networking lineup is the Virtualized Services Router (VSR), a device that leverages software-based technology dubbed NFV to deliver services on virtual machines. These two solutions are joined by HP FlexFabric 12900, a 40-gigabit Ethernet (GbE) switch, and a networking management platform called Virtual Switch 5900v. When deployed on the 5900 series physical switch, the solution can improve quality of service and simplify policy enforcement.

“Today’s data center networks are somewhat static and limiting in their ability to scale—they are also complex and require manual provisioning for cloud and virtualized applications,” said Rohit Mehra the vice president of IDC’s Network Infrastructure group. “HP’s portfolio of physical and virtual switches, as well as its SDN-enabled network fabric, indicates its readiness to address many of these challenges, providing clients simplicity, scalability and automation to enable new services and applications for the data center.”

Hewlett-Packard set out to deliver simplicity, scalability and automation for all of its customers. Earlier this week the company announced a new entry-level storage array for SMBs and a set of tools for its StoreEasy NAS line-up. These include a provisioning tool, snapshot management capabilities and a configuration wizard for StoreEasy 3830 Gateways.