Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard on Jan. 13 announced a three-year partnership to invest $250 million in cloud computing and simplification of IT and data center management. According to Microsoft, the two companies plan to "advance cloud computing by speeding application implementation, eliminating management complexities and automating manual processes to lower the overall cost of IT."
HP and Microsoft will collaborate on an engineering road map for data management machines; converged, pre-packaged application solutions; comprehensive virtualization offerings; and integrated management tools.
"This agreement, which spans hardware, software and services, will enable business customers to optimize performance with push-button simplicity at the lowest possible total cost of ownership," said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in a press release.
The infrastructure-to-application model is intended to improve the customer experience for developing, deploying and managing IT environments. The solutions include:
- Increased business efficiency through solutions that respond to changing business requirements by seamlessly converging server, storage, network and application resources in a highly automated, self-managed environment.
- Improved application performance, reliability and availability for many business applications including Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft SQL Server, by creating a deeply optimized "machine" environment. This is achieved through turnkey, pre-integrated server, storage, networking and application packages. These data management and e-mail machines provide "push-button" simplicity in deployment and management.
- Enhanced operations through integrated, interoperable virtualization and management tools that allow technology environments to be automatically provisioned, managed and continuously self-tuned. Through the integration of HP Insight Software, HP Business Technology Optimization software and Microsoft System Center with Microsoft Hyper-V Server, enterprise customers use a unified management solution to automate application deployment along with infrastructure-to-application monitoring. This integration also delivers power and performance optimization, while ensuring interoperability in a heterogeneous data center environment.
- Investment protection and low total cost of ownership, enabling customers to deploy systems with confidence. The joint solutions are built on industry standards and designed to utilize existing data center investments, all managed through a common framework. This approach is designed to allow customers to integrate private or public cloud computing models as their business requires. HP and Microsoft will collaborate on the Windows Azure platform, with HP and Microsoft offering services, and Microsoft continuing to invest in HP hardware for Windows Azure infrastructure.
