Inside the Microsoft HP deal

CRN spoke to Microsoft and HP executives in the US about the details of last week's announcement.

The two companies announced a three-year agreement to invest US$250 million (A$270million) to deliver a deeply integrated IT stack for business applications and build what they call a next-generation infrastructure-to-application model based on cloud computing.

The partnership will focus on four areas.

• Virtualisation, in particular HP blade platforms with Microsoft Hyper V;
• management, with HP picking up the rights to sell Microsoft Systems Centre Solutions, and integrate with business technology optimisation (BTO) solutions;
• selling preconfigured HP hardware with Microsoft software pre-installed;
• and collaborating on cloud computing.

The biggest news was the announcement of software-integrated machines that would come out of HP's factories ready for deployment.

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, gave the example of an Exchange mail machine or a SQL database machine that could be plugged into a network, turned on for automatic operation.

"Today when a customer buys hardware and software and marry it up in their IT centres, they go about the integration process themselves. [Instead,] software will be installed and optimised for throughput and performance and matched to the infrastructure underneath it and have management solutions ready to go," said Scott Farrand, vice president, enterprise storage and server software, technology solutions group, HP.

Aside from tuning and bundling, the vendors would optimise the products for performance, power and cooling, and for easy deployment.

"One illustration of that would be Win Server 2008 R2, which can manage workload scheduling across multiple cores of X86 machines. HP can cap maximum power usage that any particular processor is using via firmware.

"With this agreement we have a handshake between that hardware and firmware and Server 2008 to optimise the power consumption of that machine. That's drastically different to how customers experience it today," said Farrand.  
The products were to start rolling out this year and would be target SMB up to enterprise.

"The first solutions have debuted in the form of smart bundles and Hyper V and pedestal [and rack] servers," said Farrand.

Microsoft and HP were working to include System Centre management capabilities and they will be available in market soon.

Also in line were SMB bundles for virtualisation, followed by integration of Systems Essentials and SiteScope.

Scalable blade and rack versions would be available in the first half of this year, according to HP. HP would offer financing for these solutions "at good rates", said Farrand.

Read on for changes to channel investment.