Hewlett-Packard (HP) Co. and Microsoft Corp. say there will be storage elements and products involved in their collaboration alliance, including a new HP LeftHand iSCSI storage-area network (SAN) virtual appliance for Microsoft Hyper-V and storage management integration with System Center.
HP and Microsoft have pledged to spend $250 million for collaborative research and development, engineering, hiring salespeople and creating new incentives for channel partners. The deal was announced Wednesday in a webcast with CEOs Mark Hurd of HP and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, similarly to the way the CEOs of Cisco Systems Inc., EMC Corp. and VMware Corp. hailed their own Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition in November. The HP-Microsoft deal is widely seen as an answer to VCE and other recent competitive alliances...