With a common enemy insight, HP and long-standing friend F5 announced the technology behind HP's promise of software-defined networking for the converged network, which was announced back in April.

Both companies say their main rival is Cisco, and their relationship is based on strategy, but on the technology side also works.

F5 has the Layer 4 through to Layer 7 technology that allows for the provision of polices for application management, and HP has the single-pain-of-glass management tool that sits over the top of the network. This now works as more than a monitoring tool - with F5's technology, it can be used to action tasks virtually across the network.

HP and F5 made their announcements this morning at the Interop event in Las Vegas.

Parts of HP's new vision, first set out by HP Networking CTO Saar Gillai at Interop in New York in October, had become a reality.

As part of its converged infrastructure infrastructure approach, which aims to make enterprise infrastructure across the product set much easier to manage through the use of software, HP announced it was speeding up application deployment by using automation and policy-based configuration through its Intelligent Management Center.

Yesterday, HP said F5 has been integral in this new development, with the combination of HP's Virtual Application Networks and F5's ADN - application delivery network - technology providing real headway in the network management space.

The companies have collaborated on technology solutions since 2006, and F5 is a member of HP's AllianceONE program. In this instance, however, the collaboration is more focussed on gaining market share, and attacking "a common enemy" according to F5 SVP Erik Giesa.

"Our main competition is Cisco," Giesa said.

The result is what Giesa is said is the "first truly cloud-enabled network" and according to HP SVP and general manager for networking Bethany Mayer, the achievement of HP's long desired software-defined network, where applications are provisioned automatically.

The solution allows network managers to create templates for the rollout of applications across the network, which can be reused and updated if required, with edits being automatically pushed out over the network.

HP said the solution can significantly reduce the amount of time and manual work required to push out applications, making it ideal for application intense cloud computing environments.

"For Microsoft Exchange alone it takes 1,200 different configurations and policy settings striped across five different locations," Giesa said.

"Back in September we introduced a concept called iApp, which is a way to abstract all these distributed policies and configurations and roll them up into a common construct - a template if you like - that is not only portable but also programmable. It takes one method call to substantiate, establish a dependency and a single iApp will make all the necessary 1,200 configurations in under one minute."

The technology draws on OpenFlow to create the templates. At present,these solutions are focussed around Microsoft Exchange 2010, server virtualization and disaster recovery, but HP said it will expand the offering as time goes on.

We may not need to wait too long for this - in an Interview with FOCUS, Giesa said it only took a matter of weeks to integrate F5's technology for automating application delivery once the call was received from HP expressing interest.

"Since the first proof of concept, it probably took less than a week," Giesa said.

HP has also worked with F5 to delivery a new BYOD solution to its networking portfolio which provides access control for users across the enterprise, once again using its management platform.

With a starting price of US$2,739, the Virtual Application Networks addition can automate site-to-site connectivity and allow for better delivery of rich media, and the provision of securing and monitoring of devices across both wired and wireless networks.

Traditionally, wired and wireless networks have been managed separately but by using F5's Layer 7 technology, HP has been able to merge its provisioning and device monitoring capabilities with F5's application to provide a more streamlined management approach.