HP and Microsoft Debut IT Infrastructure Appliances

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As part of an expanding relationship announced this time last year, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard said this week they are collaborating to offer a line of IT infrastructure appliances.
HP (NYSE: HPQ) and its reseller partners, as well as Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) channel partners, will market the appliances which are built to provide turnkey infrastructure packages for handling mission critical business capabilities.
The initial offerings will include a portfolio of appliances targeting business intelligence, data warehousing both for enterprises as well as for small and mid-sized businesses, database consolidation, and messaging.
"[This provides] new converged application appliances that fuse applications, infrastructure and productivity tools into a single system," a joint statement from the two companies said.
The HP Business Decision Appliance, which is available now, provides a business intelligence platform built on Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint that IT professionals can install and configure in less than one hour. The appliance, not counting separate licensing fees for SQL Server and SharePoint, starts at less than $28,000.
The HP E5000 Messaging System, due out in March, will provide what Microsoft says is "the industry’s first self-contained, pre-configured platform for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010." It will start at $36,000, and as with the Business Decision Appliance, it requires a separate license for Exchange Server 2010.
Meanwhile, the HP Database Consolidation Appliance is configured to consolidate hundreds of databases into a single, virtual environment that provides users with a cloud-based database solution, according to the companies.
The consolidation appliance, which uses SQL Server 2008 Release 2 (R2) and Microsoft Hyper-V cloud, is slated to ship in the second half of this year, according to a post on Microsoft's Server and Tools Business News Bytes blog.
Additionally, Microsoft and HP announced they are coming out with the HP Business Data Warehouse Appliance -- a data store for small and mid-sized businesses. The appliance is meant as a complement to the HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance, which was announced in November.
The HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance starts at around $2 million, and the license for SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse is separate.
All of the appliances come with three years of 24-hour hardware and software support services. The HP Business Data Warehouse Appliance is due in June. Pricing was not disclosed.
Last January, Microsoft and HP announced a $250 million partnership meant to provide deep integration of data center infrastructure reaching from the applications down to the hardware with a focus on Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud computing platform, the two said at the time.
In July, HP, along with Dell and Fujitsu, announced it will sell Azure appliances so that third parties and customers can deploy Microsoft's cloud environment themselves.