Hewlett-Packard Co. filled in another missing piece of its hybrid cloud this morning with the launch of a new integrated appliance aimed at lowering the adoption barrier for enterprises. The value proposition puts a powerful open-source twist on the standard pitch for such systems.

The new Helion Rack promises to save organizations the upwards of months required to design and assemble a private cloud from scratch with a unified architecture that layers management capabilities directly over the underlying ProLiant DL servers. That’s similar to what rival Dell Inc. offers with its own private cloud, except for the native hybrid integration.

HP’s system runs a homegrown flavor of OpenStack, the same version powering its infrastructure-as-a-service platform. That provides a degree of interoperability found in few other appliances, which is a major advantage for HP over the competition for use cases that involve combining on- and off-premise resources.

Having the same management stack across both sides of the hybrid equation allows for relatively painless migration of workloads compared to the tremendous amounts of manual tinkering needed to adapt an enterprise application for an entirely different environment. That allows organizations to build services that process sensitive data locally on the appliance and offload less critical processes such as backup to HP’s public cloud in order to optimize utilization.

To smoothen the development process, Helion Rack also comes with an integrated implementation of Cloud Foundry, the open-source middleware stack that HP uses in its infrastructure-as-a-service platform to automate logistical operations such as handling communications among applications. That adds another level of commonality to improve workload mobility.

The company is trying to kill two birds with one stone and increase the appeal of its hardware while driving demand for its publiclic cloud. Helion Rack represents a landmark evolution of the strategy from the OpenStack-based object storage appliance that jump-started the effort in October of last year.