Hewlett-Packard Enterprise apparently didn’t need much time to get used to operating as an independent company. Merely a month after separating from its former consumer electronics arm, the data center equipment giant is unveiling a new kind of converged system that promises to change the way applications are run behind the firewall. It’s the culmination of a long development effort that was originally revealed before the split-up at the vendor’s annual customer conference earlier this year, which is where insiders first started making references to its vision of “composable infrastructure.”

The elevator pitch revolves around the ability to quickly configure servers, storage and networking equipment according to the requirements of a workload without any of the painstaking manual work historically involved in the process. Instead of having to change the very architecture of their environments every time some new requirement arises, operators can programmatically create a partition customized to their needs in HPE’s new system, which is appropriately dubbed Synergy.

The platform ships in the form of a vertical frame measuring 17.5 inches tall that is fitted with a mix of servers and storage drives specified by the customer alongside pre-configured nodes running the software that powers its unique functionality. A total of four units are able to to fit in a standard data center rack, which can potentially be linked up with several other Synergy enclosures each containing different hardware to cover all of an organization’s on-premise use cases.

When a new workload needs to be deployed, an administrator can simply provision the necessary resources in the most suitable part of their environment using the platform’s unified programming interface. The Synergy API serves as a single point of control for deployments, covering everything from provisioning to monitoring and updating applications, an approach that HPE claims can reduce ongoing maintenance overhead by to 30 percent. The company promises to further streamline operations with a templating mechanism that makes it possible to save configuration parameters in a file that can be reused multiple times.

The feature should come particularly handy for distributed workloads that are spread out over a large number of identical nodes and development projects that require recreating the conditions of an organization’s production environment for testing purposes. The potential use cases are numerous and so are different combination of technologies customers will employ in their deployments, which is why HPE is currently working to add support for nearly half a dozen different management automation offerings including Puppet and Chef.

The company’s end goal is to bridge the gap between running applications behind the firewall and in the public cloud, where spinning up a new workload is as simple as making a few API commands. Synergy will still requires organizations to manage the underlying infrastructure, but provisioning that infrastructure should become much much less of a chore after the platform hits  general availability in the second quarter of next year.  In the meantime, you can tune in to theCUBE’s live coverage from the launch event to get the inside track on HPE’s plans.

Image via HPE