Big day with big announcements, at HPE Discover in London HP announced besides the new Synergy platform also another important new platform HPE ConvergedSystem 250 Hyper-Converged StoreVirtual (aka CS250-HC). The platform is very cool and revolutionary because of the fact that it is an all-in-one box that allows the deployment of complete infrastructure in just 15 minutes…
Until today. HP announced besides the CS250 for VMware vSphere, now also the HPE Hyper Converged 250 for Microsoft Cloud Platform System (CPS) Standard.
If you had the chance and bought HP Apollo 2000 platform and installed the Microsoft CloudOS, you will notice it’s the same hardware, but the difference is it’s not the 15-minute instant-on magic installation as with ConvergedSystem 250 for Microsoft CPS.
I was waiting for this announcement for a long time and good to hear HP made it.
Besides the all-in-one philosophy, this solution has some more interesting stuff in it. By adding the Windows Azure Pack (WAP) and in the future Microsoft Azure Stack (MAS), it allows the customers to connect directly to Microsoft Azure and move workloads from the hardware platform to the Azure public cloud and back. With this, it supports the new relationship of HPE with Microsoft Azure to combine their cloud roadmap together…
The Azure-consistent cloud in a box (HPE Hyper Converged 250) will support Microsoft Azure Backup to protect critical assets and Azure Site Recovery for full features of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) as Add-on.
As for scalability, you have the choice of:
- (2) Intel® Xeon® E5-2640 v3 or E5-2680 v3 processors.
- 128 GB, 256 GB, or 512 GB memory.
- Hybrid configuration with SAS and SSD.
- Capacity configuration with all SAS drives.
- (2) 10 Gbe SFP+ RDMA network connectivity.
- Maximum configuration = (4) appliances compact 2U chassis up to 16 nodes.
The extended partnership appoints Microsoft Azure as a preferred public cloud partner for HPE customers while HPE will serve as a preferred partner in providing infrastructure and services for Microsoft’s hybrid cloud offerings.
This newly announced Hyper-Converged 250 System is the first real product on the market supporting this new cooperation. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella himself was one of the guests to announce this new partnership.
The new appliance comes pre-configured with Windows Server 2016 and later, System Center, Windows Azure Pack, Azure Stack HCI, and HPE OneView Instant-On.
More information can be found on the HPE and Microsoft website.
Cheers,
-Charbel
