This article is more than 1 year old

HPE has stabbed VMware in the front with converged Azure boxen

Ye olde HP said it was too busy to sell EVO:RAIL appliances

Comment Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) today beamed Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in for a video chat at its Discover conference, and in so doing basically stabbed VMware in the front.

Nadella appeared at the conference to talk up the cloudy collaboration between the two, which over a week has grown from a pledge that Azure would henceforth be HPE's cloud of choice to a closer relationship that now includes a hyperconverged on-premises Azure box.

Readers nay recall that the old HP killed its version of Virtzilla's EVO:RAIL hyperconverged appliance. VMware folk later told El Reg's virtualisation desk that HP insisted its sales force just didn't have enough bandwidth to sell its own StoreVirtual hyperconverged appliances and VMware's. Virtzilla was disappointed, but consoled itself with the fact that all other aspects of the HP/VMware relationship remained intact.

As of today, however, we know that HPE's salesforce and channel apparently do have the bandwidth to sell StoreVirtual and the new Azure appliances.

Five months have passed since HP binned EVO:RAIL. In that time the relevant bits of HP have killed off the Helion public cloud (Helion private clouds remain a product) and become HPE. So perhaps there are some HPE people with more time on their hands. And of course Dell and EMC have decided to merge, making VMware rather less non-aligned than it was in the past.

None of that changes the fact that HPE has decided to make a bet on Azure that it backed away from making with VMware. Virtzilla's got every right to feel pretty miffed about this, especially if HPE cooked up the Azure connection before it binned EVO:RAIL. HPE will doubtless claim it's tight with VMware and committed to customer choice. But it has made a choice for its own customers that isn't VMware. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like