HPE Closes $650M SimpliVity Acquisition, Says First Combined Solutions With DL380 Will Ship In May

Hewlett Packard Enterprise on Friday said it has closed its acquisition of hyper-converged infrastructure pioneer SimpliVity, and that its customers and partners can expect to see the first fruits of the combined company in May.

HPE last month unveiled plans to acquire Westborough, Mass.-based SimpliVity for $650 million. HPE plans to integrate the SimpliVity software and hardware with its industry-leading servers to grab a share of the fast-growing hyper-converged infrastructure market.

Ric Lewis, senior vice president and general manager of HPE's Software Defined & Cloud Group, on Friday, said in a blog post that HPE's existing hyper-converged infrastructure solutions would benefit from the added SimpliVity technology, which brings with it strong resiliency, data protection, compression and deduplication, and virtual machine optimization.

[Related: CEO Says NetApp Will Soon Introduce Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Solution Based On All-Flash SolidFire Tech]

Those capabilities can be added to HPE's other offerings as well, including HPE Synergy converged infrastructure and HPE 3Par storage, Lewis wrote.

Existing SimpliVity customers and partners should see no change from the close, he wrote.

HPE also plans to integrate the SimpliVity technology in the company's ProLiant DL380 servers, Lewis wrote. The company is already taking orders for the solution, and is planning to deliver them starting in May.

HPE in the second half of the year plans to more closely integrate the HPE and SimpliVity technologies with new capabilities including "workspace controls," Lewis wrote.

"Workspace controls … business leaders and developers with simple self-service portals to compose virtualized and containerized resources and enhanced business insight, including predictive analytics. This will give IT managers the tools they need to increase resource utilization and proactively respond to needs for new resources," he wrote.

It's good to see HPE's integration of SimpliVity going according to plan, said Dan Molina, chief technology officer at Nth Generation Computing, a San Diego-based solution provider and longtime HPE channel partner.

"The smartest thing HPE can do is fit the number one server, the DL380, with SimpliVity as fast as possible," Molina told CRN. "Putting SimpliVity on that great server platform is a no-brainer."

Molina said he looks forward to HPE's integration of SimpliVity with other parts of the HPE product line.

"I'd like to see SimpliVity's user experience under HPE's OneView for a heterogeneous view, but I know this will take some time," he said.

HPE's acquisition of SimpliVity, and other moves like NetApp's plans to enter the hyper-converged infrastructure market with a solution based on its SolidFire all-flash storage technology, points to an interesting 2017 for the industry, Molina said.

"Hyper-converged infrastructure is booming," he said. "We're seeing a lot on moves by NetApp, Nutanix, Cisco with its HyperFlex, VMware's VxRail and VxRack, and now HPE and SimpliVity. This is giving customers a lot more choices."