Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) jumped on the VMware cloud bandwagon, launching a platform that combines HPE’s Synergy product with VMware’s Cloud Foundation. Enterprises taking up the service will receive help in moving to a hybrid cloud infrastructure; deploying private clouds; and reducing virtual machine (VM) costs.

The integration work allows HPE to offer dynamic control over the use of bare metal, virtualized, and Cloud Foundation resources. The companies also claim enterprises can use the product to deploy and manage infrastructure and Cloud Foundation software “in minutes with a few simple clicks.”

Cloud Foundation is VMware’s software-defined data center (SDDC) platform that includes vSphere for compute, VSAN for storage, NSX for network virtualization, and its vCenter for management.

HPE launched Synergy in late 2015, touting the product as a “composable infrastructure” in contrast to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platforms.

Composable infrastructure combines compute, storage, and networking into a pool of fluid resources that an application can grab as necessary to meet its specific needs. HPE’s infrastructure management software automates, provisions, and configures resources according to application needs.

VMware Cloud Foundation on HPE Synergy is scheduled for commercial launch later this year.

Private Cloud on HCI

HPE also launched its Private Cloud Express product, which taps VMware’s vRealize running on HPE’s SimpliVity 380 platform. VMware’s vRealize product is a cloud management solution targeted at heterogeneous and hybrid clouds. HPE’s SimpliVity 380 HCI product combines x86 resources, storage, and storage networking.

Private Cloud Express is designed to extend existing virtualized environments as the basis for a private cloud services platform. The extension allows for the movement of workloads between private and public clouds by using the vRealize orchestration capabilities.

The product is scheduled to launch next month.

Balancing public and private cloud deployments was part of an HPE announcement in June at its Discover event.

Ric Lewis, general manager of HPE’s software-defined and cloud group, said the company is working on a project, internally named Project New Stack, that will help IT departments bridge their on-premise, private cloud ecosystems to public clouds.

The move caters to an increasingly more frequent demand from IT departments: they want to optimize the placement of their workloads between private and public clouds.