A year ago, Microsoft and HP announced a three-year, $250 million partnership to deliver jointly developed “application solutions” and hardware-software appliances.
On January 19, 2011, the pair went public with plans for a handful of the turnkey products resulting from the deal.
The goal of these application appliances is to reduce IT complexity by making configuration, deployment and management easier, officials from the two companies said.
On the roadmap (which I’ve updated to fix my SKU errors)L
HP Business Decision Appliance: A combination of Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2, and SharePoint 2010 preinstalled on an HP server. The offer comes with three years of HP hardware and software support services. Price is around $28,000; shipping as of January 19.
HP E5000 Messaging System for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010: Includes, as the name indicates, Exchange Server 2010 (running on Windows Server 2008 R2). Available as of March, 2011, starting at $36,000, including three years of HP hardware/software support services.
HP Database Consolidation Appliance: A hardware-software bundle designed to consolidate hundreds of databases into a single virtual environment. The pair are touting this as a private-cloud solution that builds on top of Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2, and Hyper-V Cloud stack. Availability is slated for the June 2011; no pricing information is available yet.
HP Business Data Warehouse Appliance: Optimized for Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 R2, this appliance for mid-size and enterprise customers is due in the second half of calendar 2011. No pricing information is available yet.
HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance: This is a data warehouse appliance built around Microsoft’s highest end SQL Server SKU, known as SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse. The pair say the target customers are enterprise businesses; the price tag is around $2 million, which includes three years of HP hardware/software support. It is available now.
Microsoft and HP are hardly the only ones doing turnkey data appliances. Teradata is still alive and kicking (and doing more in the cloud realm). Oracle has Exadata (and Sun hardware).And IBM and Neteeza are in this space, as well.
By the way… Today’s Microsoft and HP appliance announcement has nothing to do with the Windows Azure Appliances that the two have committed to deliver. For now, neither Microsoft nor HP (nor Microsoft’s other Azure Appliance customers) are providing an updated delivery date for those private-cloud-in-a-box systems (which were on tap to be available to customers by the end of 2010, last we heard.)
