HPE has announced plans to offer an integrated, Azure-compatible system that will support IaaS and PaaS services inside the customer's data centre.
Expected to ship by mid-2017, the HPE | Microsoft Azure Stack will allow enterprise-scale organisations to combine the speed and simplicity of public cloud with the cost-effectiveness and security of an on-premises private cloud, HPE officials said.
The system is being co-engineered by HPE and Microsoft.
"Microsoft and HPE share a view that hybrid cloud capabilities and consistency across public and private cloud environments help customers accelerate their cloud strategy," said Microsoft general manager of product marketing, Mike Schutz.
{loadposition stephen08}"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."
HPE Consulting for Azure Hybrid Cloud services are available immediately to help enterprises and service providers successfully implement Azure Stack. These services extend to security, workload migration, identity, networking and back-up and recovery.
"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 HPE South Pacific server group lead category manager Vickie Nery.
"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."
Azure Stack will be based on HPE's ProLiant DL380 server.
In related news, HPE Flexible Capacity (a single bill, pay-by-use pricing model that includes support) can now include Azure, and HPE plans to add Azure Stack to Flexible Capacity.