HP-Microsoft Unveils Data Appliances for SMBs. Enterprises

SOURCE:  ZDNet

Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard today announced a slew of products centered around data warehousing, business intelligence (BI) and enterprise messaging, which are the first fruits of a global three-year, US$250 million partnership announced last year.

According to Douglas Small, global alliances marketing director for HP’s enterprise servers, storage and networking (ESSN), these appliances are the result of a close collaboration between both companies to integrate their existing product portfolios. These include Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform and SQL server software, as well as HP’s services and hardware offerings, Small said.

The two companies jointly announced the launch of the HP Business Decision appliance and HP Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) appliance during a conference call here Wednesday. The former is available from today, while EDW has been on the market since November last year, according to HP.

Elaborating, Small said while the EDW appliance is not the first of its kind in the market, it compares well with competing offerings. In particular, he described the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition’s integrated datacenter VBlock offering as an “incomplete” portfolio, and Oracle’s Exadata Database Machine as a “complex” deployment roadmap.

Formed in November 2009, the VCE joint venture is an initiative of EMC, VMware and Cisco Systems. The group’s VBlock offering combines EMC’s storage equipment, Cisco’s virtualized servers and networking equipment, and VMware’s virtualization technology.

According to Oracle’s Web site, the Exadata Database Machine is described as “the only database machine that provides extreme performance for both data warehousing and online transaction processing applications, making it the ideal platform for consolidating onto grids or private clouds”.

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