HP Partners with Microsoft in the Private Cloud

It’s no secret that Hewlett-Packard has a close technology partnership with Microsoft, which the two companies this week extended for another three years.

What is changing is the focus of that partnership. The two companies plan to work closely together to make deploying private clouds based on Windows Server 2012 a lot easier. According to Jeff Carlat, director of software marketing for HP industry standard servers and software, that work will include new cloud system reference architectures and the ability to dynamically add physical servers to a private cloud using an HP Autoflex server offering the two companies are working on together. That clustering capability, adds Carlat, can be managed by either HP consoles of Microsoft System Center 2012 software.

The challenge that many IT organizations are facing when it comes to building private clouds, says Carlat, is figuring out a way to shift to a new paradigm for enterprise computing without disrupting existing data center operations. In fact, it’s that issue that leads a lot of organizations to conclude they will continue to manage legacy applications on existing IT infrastructure, while moving gradually to a private cloud with the deployment of new applications.

In addition, many organizations are also struggling with staffing issues that result from shifting to private clouds that allow fewer administrators to manage server, storage and networking resources versus having to rely on specialists to manage each of those functions independently.

In short, no matter how big the benefits, major change doesn’t take place inside IT organizations overnight. Not only will organizations take a fair amount of time to start deploying private clouds, chances are they will be managing existing systems and alongside more modern servers deployed as part of a private cloud for years to come.