By Maureen O'Gara
They laughed at Larry Ellison and his Sun-based appliances and then went off and copied the idea. A year and a quarter of a billion dollars worth of investment later HP and Microsoft have a portfolio of pre-packaged appliances optimizing Microsoft's software on HP's hardware, a remnant of the Hurd administration at HP.
They're supposed to save their users a lot of time - paring months into hours - and they're supposed to up the percentage of IT projects that deliver critical business apps that are rated successful by the organizations implementing them. Currently the number stands at 32%.
Besides workload-specific appliances, HP and Microsoft also plan to deliver an HP Database Consolidation Appliance optimized for SQL Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft Hyper-V Cloud that consolidates hundreds of databases into a single, virtual environment and creates a private cloud database solution with the cloud's signature self-service, on-demand scalability and dynamic elasticity.
It's due in the second half. The blueprints will be offered to customers who have advanced IT skills and prefer to build their own appliance.
Meantime, there's a $28,000 BI-focused HP Business Decision Appliance for running SQL Server and SharePoint along with Microsoft's PowerPivot add-in for Excel and a scalable $36,000 HP E5000 Messaging System for Microsoft Exchange Server. They should be available in early March.
HP and Microsoft will offer support and consulting services for the converged application appliances.
Oh, yes, and the Microsoft software has to be licensed separately on top of the prices quoted.
via http://virtualization.sys-con.com/node/1685389
