HP and Microsoft Simplify Technology Environments with Solutions Built on New Infrastructure-to-Application Model

HP and Microsoft Corp. today announced a three-year agreement to invest $250 million to significantly simplify technology environments for businesses of all sizes.   The companies plan to deliver new solutions that will

• Be built on a next-generation infrastructure-to-application model,
• Advance cloud computing by speeding application implementation,
• Eliminate complexities of IT management and automate existing manual processes to lower overall costs

This agreement represents the industry’s most comprehensive technology stack integration to date -- from infrastructure to application -- and is intended to substantially improve the customer experience for developing, deploying and managing IT environments.

With this strategic partnership, HP and Microsoft will collaborate on an engineering roadmap for data management machines; converged, prepackaged application solutions; comprehensive virtualization offerings and integrated management tools. Delivered through the industry’s most extensive sales and partner network, these dynamic IT solutions will be designed to provide:

— 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 some of the industry’s top business applications, 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 email 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 datacenter 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 enable 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 offering services, and Microsoft continuing to invest in HP hardware for Windows Azure infrastructure.

The new infrastructure-to-application model from HP and Microsoft will be delivered as integrated offerings for large, heterogeneous datacenter environments as well as through solutions designed for small and midsized businesses. Solutions are available immediately, with new offerings being introduced throughout the next three years.

Source: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2010/jan10/01-13InfToAppPR.mspx