HPE Details Microsoft Azure Stack Offering

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has revealed the details about its systems that will form part of the Microsoft Azure Stack.

It comes after Microsoft controversially decided in the summer to roll out the Azure Stack through certified hardware partners, rather than letting customers run the software on any hardware they want to.

Hybrid Cloud

The Microsoft Azure Stack promises to be a significant development in the cloud space when it arrives sometime next year, as it is a cloud infrastructure product that will let a business to run Azure infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings directly in their own data centres.

Essentially, it will allow firms to create an Azure cloud within their own data centre, so long as it is running on certified equipment from either HPE, Dell or Lenovo.

HPE said that its upcoming Microsoft Azure Stack offering will be combined with its HPE Consulting to help enterprise customers and service providers successfully implement the Azure Stack, as well as Azure support service.

“Many enterprises would like to host Azure within their data centres for performance, security or compliance reasons and many service providers would like to offer Azure-compatible services for data sovereignty or other targeted services,” said Paul Miller, VP of marketing at HPE’s Converged Data Center Infrastructure division.

“HPE is teaming with Microsoft to deliver the right mix of on- and off-premises Azure services with built-in security, operations management, pay-as-you-go pricing and the expertise that provides unmatched flexibility and cost savings for enterprise workloads,” said Miller.

At the foundation of the HPE Azure Stack solution will be the ProLiant DL 380, which HPE is offering as a “complete compute, storage, networking and software system”.

HPE says that by using a consistent, uniform portal, IT operators and developers can quickly access both Azure public and private cloud services to rapidly provision cloud resources, build applications, and easily move them between Azure public cloud and Azure Stack running on-premises.

Pay As You Go

It will also offer a pay-as-you-go ownership model and unified billing of public and private clouds.

“Microsoft and HPE share a view that hybrid cloud capabilities and consistency across public and private cloud environments helps customers accelerate their cloud strategy,” said Mike Schutz, general manager of product marketing at Microsoft. “The HPE solution for Azure Stack builds off the relationship we announced last year, tightly integrating the hardware, software, support and services to help customers benefit from the pace of cloud innovation while reducing deployment complexity and risk.”

In additional to the hardware, consultancy and support services, the HPE Azure Stack will also include an analytics-driven, automated operations management offering for managing Azure private cloud, Azure public cloud and traditional IT, said HPE, and will be available in mid-2017.

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