There are two legs to the new deal between Nutanix and HPE.

Firstly, Nutanix's Enterprise Cloud OS software — including the free, built-in AHV hypervisor — will be available on HPE GreenLake.

This will provide customers with a fully HPE-managed hybrid cloud providing lower total cost of ownership and faster time to value, according to the parties.

Nutanix ANZ channel manager Andrew Diamond told iTWire said the announcement would benefit both companies' channel partners. HPE partners will be able to sell a server preconfigured with Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS, and Nutanix partners will be able to sell Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS ready to run straight out of the box on an HPE server.

But it's really about the customer, he said. It's hard to be agile and cost effective if you're locked into one vendor's stack and business model. The partnership with HPE means organisations can make decisions that suit their own requirements.

Together, these two announcements deliver fully managed hybrid cloud infrastructure delivered as a service and deployed in customers' data centres or co-location facility, providing an unusual level of flexibility.

Suggested use cases include virtualised mission-critical workloads and big data applications from SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft; plus virtualised big data applications such as Splunk and Hadoop.

Cost reductions come from a 30% saving on capex through reduced overprovisioning), and a 90% reduction in support and professional services costs.

"HPE created the modern on-premises, as a service consumption market with HPE GreenLake. Hundreds of global customers now leverage HPE GreenLake to get the benefits of a cloud experience combined with the security, governance, and application performance of an on-premises environment, while paying for the service based on actual consumption," said HPE president and chief executive Antonio Neri.

"Today, HPE is expanding its leadership in this market by providing additional choice to customers seeking a hybrid cloud alternative that promises greater agility at lower costs."

Nutanix founder, chairman and chief executive Dheeraj Pandey said, "Our customers tell us that it's their applications that matter most. Our partnership with HPE will provide Nutanix customers with another choice to make their infrastructure invisible so they can focus on business-critical apps, not the underlying technology.

"We are delighted to partner with HPE for the benefit of enterprises looking for the right hybrid cloud solution for their business."

The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software on HPE GreenLake and the integrated appliance utilising Nutanix software on HPE servers are expected to be available in 3Q19.