Windows 7: Microsoft-HP appliance collaboration yields first fruit

Microsoft and HP announced last year a $250 million, three-year alliance between the two companies to collaborate on a range of IT infrastructure projects. The first deliverables from this project were announced today: a range of appliances for running Microsoft enterprise software.

Each appliance combines hardware, software, support, and management into a single, easy-to-deploy unit. Four were announced today: two available immediately and two later in the year. The promise for each is the same: turnkey, ready-to-run access to a range of Microsoft's enterprise software. Each appliance is tailored to its chosen workload and applications, and so it offers only limited configuration customization.

The two available today are the HP Business Decision Appliance, and the HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance. The first of these is a SharePoint system: SharePoint 2010, SQL Server 2008 R2, and Windows Server 2008 R2 preinstalled onto an HP server. The companies say that it should take less than an hour to get installed and running. Pricing starts at around $28,000 with three years of support, with the SharePoint and SQL Server licenses purchased separately (so that they can use existing volume licenses).