Hewlett-Packard is expanding its RFID services for IT-infrastructure tracking with the introduction of the HP Factory Express RFID service, launched today. The service features the application of EPC Gen 2 RFID tags to the blade servers and other IT assets a company orders, and is an extension of HP’s Factory Express offering. Factory Express provides HP’s customers with preconfigured IT products that the company installs and tests for them, allowing the customers to get up and running with functional servers, data storage and other IT products right out of the box.
By having the HP Factory Express RFID service apply tags to the product they order, says Frank Lanza, worldwide RFID director for HP’s Technology Solutions Group, customers can employ fixed-position or handheld RFID readers to begin tracking the IT assets’ locations as soon as they receive them.
HP also offers the IT Asset Tracking service, developed by the company’s R&D arm, HP Labs, located in Palo Alto, Calif. Grocery chain operator Meijer vetted the system, comprised of RFID tags, interrogators and software, beginning in 2006 (see Meijer Tests HP’s IT Asset-Tracking RFID System). Meijer has since deployed the system, Lanza says, and a number of other companies have done so as well, to track IT assets in their respective data centers.
HP created its Factory Express RFID service in response to customer demand for a way to enable customers to begin tracking blade servers and other newly purchased IT assets upon receiving them from HP. “With the advent of blade servers and virtualization, coupled with increasing enterprise concerns on privacy protection and risk, IT managers toss and turn at night worrying about someone walking out of their data centers with their blade servers [which often store valuable or sensitive business data],” says Michael Dortch, a senior analyst with market research firm Aberdeen Group.
Although RFID technology vendors have long identified IT asset tracking as a strong potential market for RFID, Dortch says, technical shortcomings with passive tags, due to RF interference in the metal-rich data centers, as well as the high cost of adding active tags to large numbers of IT assets, have forced many companies to hold off deploying the technology in their data centers.
But improvements in the readability of passive tags, through improved form factors and chip design for Gen 2 tags, is opening the door for more firms to begin employing RFID. “Using RFID in the computer room is growing by leaps and bounds right now,” says John Fontenalla, VP of market research firm AMR Research.
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.