Jerome Riboloun of HP and Greg Scherer, the vice president of server and storage strategy at Broadcom, hopped into theCUBE at last week’s Discover summit to discuss SDN with Wikibon co-founder Dave Vellante.

Hewlett-Packard recently upgraded its server lineup with Intel’s latest Ivy Bridge processors and added portfolio-wide support for some of the more advanced networking capabilities available with Broadcom’s adapter chipsets, Riboloun says. The updates accelerate virtual workloads and complement HP’s FlexLOM LAN on motherboard offering.

“The FlexLOM capability, or the FLR and FLB capability for rack versus the blade environment, all that capability really plays in so nicely now into the Ivy Bridge launch,” Scherer explains. You have these incredibly powerful servers, and now you have the capability to have any combination of I/O that you want: 1Gb, multiple ports of 1Gb, 10Gb.”

That means more choice and flexibility for customers, who no longer have to risk being locked into a solution due to networking constraints. FlexLOM not only simplifies migration, but also ensures that management and monitoring features are retained after an upgrade. This functionality is the result of the long standing partnership between HP and Broadcom, which Riboloun says spans the entire product lifecycle from engineering to deployment. The pair also collaborate on identifying and addressing customer needs in different regions, an important task given that companies in North America often have different requirements from their EMEA counterparts.

“There are key major trends that we see across the board, but I would say in Europe we are fragmented types of markets, so different countries with their different types of requirements,” Riboloun details. “If you take countries like Spain, [they] will be very small and medium businesses orientated…so they really require a lot of simplification – much more than larger corporations.”

Elaborating on the relations between HP and Broadcom, Scherer says that the firms are working to standardize their network partitioning technology via IEEE. The goal is to establish a set of open standards that will benefit the entire industry, including the competition. Watch the interview below for more.