Late on Tuesday, January 17 HPE acquired converged infrastructure provider SimpliVity for $650 million. This transaction was aimed at obtaining OmniStack, SimpliVity's Data Virtualization Technology that enables true VM-centric scale-out of virtualized environments. HPE's leadership team regards OmniStack as a "simplification layer that will drive down OPEX and increase application density in multi cloud environments."

Combined with HPE's hyperconverged and composable infrastructure offerings, OmniStack will allow customers to rapidly provision and centrally manage virtual machines (VMs) across racks, data centers, and public clouds using their existing tools, such as VMware vSphere. Within 60 days of closing the transaction, HPE intends to offer the SimpliVity OmniStack software qualified for HPE ProLiant DL380 servers. In the second half of 2017, the company will offer a range of integrated HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged systems based on ProLiant Servers.