Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Microsoft expand cloud partnership with hardware

The newly formed Hewlett Packard Enterprise now has some hardware to back up its recently announced partnership with Microsoft around cloud.

The side of the old HP that was focused on enterprise IT, and is now a standalone company, will now sell a product called the HPE Hyper-Converged 250 for Microsoft Cloud Platform System Standard. It’s converged infrastructure with compute, storage, and networking functionality wrapped up into one big hunk of gear. (Technical term: cloud in a box.) Companies can install it in their on-premises data centers if they’re interested in hybrid cloud that involves reaching into the Microsoft Azure public cloud. From today’s statement:

Bringing together industry leading HPE ProLiant technology and Microsoft Azure innovation, the jointly engineered solution brings Azure services to customers’ datacenters, empowering users to choose where and how they want to leverage the cloud. An Azure management portal enables business users to self-deploy Windows and Linux workloads, while ensuring IT has central oversight. Azure services provide reliable backup and disaster recovery, and with HPE OneView for Microsoft System Center, customers get an integrated management experience across all system components. HPE offers hardware and software support, installation and startup services to customers to speed deployment to just a matter of hours, lower risk and decrease total cost of ownership.

It wasn’t clear if Hewlett Packard Enterprise would be peddling hardware, in addition to selling the Microsoft public cloud to its customers. The history you need to know here is that HP effectively gave up in the public cloud business and has chosen to go the partner route.

Microsoft is a perfectly good partner to choose. It’s not the market leader — that would be Amazon Web Services — and it’s already got enterprise credibility.

But Dell actually beat HP — excuse me, HPE — to the punch with the concept of converged hardware for hybrid cloud. Just last month, Dell and Microsoft jointly announced the Microsoft Cloud Platform System Standard for Dell hardware. That product was a smaller version of the Microsoft Cloud Platform System Premium software for Dell hardware that was announced last year. The irony there is that Dell once tried to erect a public cloud of its own but ultimately scrapped the plans.

The new joint Microsoft and HPE product is available to order today, according to the statement, which offers more detail on the partnership that HPE chief executive Meg Whitman very briefly announced last week.

A spec sheet for the new product is here.