Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Mesosphere announced a deal to further integrate Mesosphere’s datacenter operating system (DC/OS) with HPE’s hardware and software. The companies say the agreement will help enterprises’ hybrid cloud adoption.

It builds on HPE’s February original equipment manufacturing (OEM) and reseller agreement with Mesosphere, which saw HPE begin reselling Mesosphere’s software on HPE servers. HPE also led Mesosphere’s $73.5 million C Round last year.

The new agreement integrates Mesosphere’s DC/OS with HPE Synergy composable hardware and HPE OneView management software 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.

Integrating Mesosphere’s technology with HPE OneView allows users to provision and update bare metal DC/OS nodes in the same way as virtual and cloud resources. This makes it easy for administrators to deploy and elastically scale a cluster on bare metal servers, said Mesosphere CMO Peter Guagenti.

“HPE is focused on really moving to software-defined infrastructure; we’re drafting behind that so it’s a seamless experience to go from setting up a server, using their software and tools to make that available, and adding those nodes inside DC/OS,” Guagenti said. “If you want to run containers or microservices or anything else that runs on our DC/OS in your data center, now we’ve gone from weeks or months to configure a datacenter for these types of applications to just hours.”

This helps enterprises with hybrid cloud adoption: placing various workloads on premise, in public clouds, and in private clouds. It also enables them to avoid public cloud lock-in: being stuck in a lengthy contract with a cloud services provider that can cost millions or even billions of dollars

“Cloud is not a place, it’s a function, it’s a method,” Guagenti said. “We’re now seeing that.

“Let’s say you are an existing HPE customer. If you wanted to spin up a container and big data infrastructure, you could do that in minutes to hours now, depending on if those servers are already racked. There’s no more ‘I go to public cloud because it takes too long to do this internally.’ You click a button, Spark is up and running. You click a button, [Apache] Cassandra is up and running. You click a button and containers are deployed.”

Ric Lewis, general manager of HPE’s software-defined and cloud group, also stressed the importance of hybrid cloud adoption at the HPE Discover conference this week in Las Vegas.

“If there’s one commonality our customers have, it’s that they live in a hybrid IT world,” Lewis wrote in a blog post. “They run a mix of workloads on traditional IT, as well as private, managed, and public clouds. That mix is different for every organization, dynamically changing as business needs require.”

Mesosphere’s partnership with HPE also helps the startup extend its reach into the enterprise. Last month, the company announced a reference architecture deal with Dell EMC, meaning Mesosphere is now closely aligned with the two largest enterprise OEMs.

“We’re still a very small company, a cloud-native company,” Guagenti said. “We’re focused on next-generation applications but because we are small, we need a better path into the enterprise. Dell EMC and HPE give us a path.”