Bill Johnson, director of R&D for ProCurve, said that with the advent of the ACM, in addition to enabling WLAN access point management from the switch, it can now manage wired access ports within the 5300. He said that having made the 700wl functionality available as switch module, the next step will be to take it to an ASIC.

The ACM costs $5,499, and he said with a further power-over-Ethernet module, APs can be powered over the network. He said the advantage of having the WLAN access controller integrated into a switch, besides being able to apply AP control to wired ports, is that the data path can be accessed directly.

Mr Johnson said ProCurve also sees the ACM as a platform on which to deliver further functionality into the 5300, such as a Radius server, VPN or our SFlow traffic sampling capability.

A differentiating factor between the HP access control technology for WLANs and that of other vendors such as Cisco Systems (with the technology it acquired earlier this year with Airespace) and Aruba Wireless Networks is that it manages all APs equally, whereas both the other vendors offer enhanced functionality only on their APs.

The ACM was announced on Monday alongside HP’s entry into the routing space with two branch-office boxes, and came just a few days after the Palo Alto, California-based vendor unveiled another feature for the 5300, namely the Virus Throttling capability available as a software upgrade on the switches.

This technology was unveiled at the RSA Conference in San Francisco and has a lot in common with intrusion detection/prevention systems, in that it monitors network behavior for things such as abnormally high levels of connections, then moves to contain virus attacks without waiting for a signature, using message queuing to throttle back the offending exploit without impacting normal traffic.

HP also announced the inclusion of a Link Layer Discovery Protocol capability, enabling device discovery based on a standard ProCurve promoted actively. HP is aware that it will almost certainly be operating in mixed environments with Cisco equipment and so has made provision for information from the proprietary Cisco Discovery Protocol to be loadable into the HP switches.

There is also an option for Radius server authentication for switch manager login, making for better console login on the 5300, Mr Johnson said.

In a generic comparison between the security features ProCurve is integrating into its devices and the Self-Defending Network strategy enunciated by Cisco, Johnson said the latter requires proprietary technology, such as specific software clients loaded onto the devices in the network, whereas we want to enable customers to secure them without incurring the burden of these additions. He cited, by way of example, HP’s participation in the Trusted Computing Group and its contributions toward the development of Microsoft’s Network Access Protection platform to enable supplicant device scanning for security policy compliance prior to granting network access.

Mr Johnson also admitted the hypothesis that HP might at some point open up the operating system running on its switches with a view to enabling integration with third-party products such as true intrusion detection/intrusion prevention systems. That would be at a later stage, though, he said.

HP clearly wants to highlight its openness and standards-based approach to networking generally, and security in particular, as a way of differentiating itself from what it considers to be an overly proprietary stance of the market leader, Cisco.

This is, of course, a standard modus operandi for challenges to a company enjoying market dominance, and indeed, a healthy one in that it promotes standards generally, enabling users to avoid technology lock-in. The degree to which it is successful tends to determine the speed and degree to which a sector commoditizes: standards tend to make it easier for customers to force price reductions, with vendors bundling increasing numbers of features on their products as default as a way of differentiating them and justifying prices or attracting buyers away from rivals by being more feature-rich.