HP Launches Service That Applies Tags to Items It Ships

Keeping tabs on the locations of a company's tagged IT assets can help it make them more secure, and also lower the labor costs associated with taking manual inventory of the goods. RFID interrogators mounted within server racks can be utilized to monitor an asset's location in real time, or handheld readers can be carried throughout a data center and used to interrogate racks on a periodic basis, in order to update inventory. Moreover, interrogators mounted at chokepoints can track the movements of tagged readers in and out of data center portals.

Big organizations often place orders for large numbers of IT assets, Fontenalla says, so the ability to have those assets arrive pretagged should make the Factory Express RFID service attractive to HP's large corporate customers. HP spokesperson Dayna Fried says the firm's target markets for the new service are "mostly enterprise customers throughout several verticals, including the financial industry, manufacturing, media/communications—any large company that has several hundred to several thousands servers, storage technology and racks."

According to HP, some of its customers that have already deployed the company's IT Asset Tracking service at their data centers will be among the first users of the Factory Express RFID service. For each IT Asset Tracking deployment, the firm works with a network of vendor partners to select the tags, readers and RFID middleware needed, based on customer requirements.

With the HP Factory Express RFID Service, it plans to follow this same practice—handpicking interrogators, tags and middleware per each customer's needs. HP will also pre-encode the tags and ensure that they are operable and properly mounted on every IT asset purchased. Lanza says HP will employ only passive ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID tags and readers that comply with the EPC Gen 2 (ISO 18000-6C) standard. The service costs between $5 and $10 for each tag, which can be affixed to the outside of HP ProLiant and HP Integrity server systems, HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array products, HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Arrays, HP server enclosures and HP rack infrastructure.

"Recent surveys indicate that IT asset tracking is an area of growing importance to users in a broad range of enterprises," Dortch says, adding that he sees HP as being well-positioned to offer RFID-based tracking solutions for data centers, based on its experience both as a user of RFID technology in its own operations and as a provider of RFID professional services.

Dortch recently launched a new survey on RFID and IT infrastructure management. RFID Journal readers can participate by visiting www.aberdeen.com/survey/rfid-im-rjournal and taking a 10-minute survey online. Participants will receive a free copy of the full report on the survey's results.