Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. on Monday launched a new “micro data center” aimed at companies using both their own servers and software and cloud computing to do heavy-duty data analysis.

Announced at the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas Monday, HPE’s new converged information technology and facilities platform marries management control with data center computing, networking and storage, all on a wheeled appliance.

The new offering is geared toward distributed applications and other IT functions, including so-called “edge computing,” which is the concept of moving processing power toward the network edge in order to analyze data as it’s created. One possible use case, according to SDX Central, could be an ocean oil platform, which creates a lot of data that could be handled onsite by the micro data center.

HPE’s modular micro data center also highlights the company’s new emphasis on software-defined infrastructure. Although HPE spun off a huge chunk of its software business earlier this year, Chief Executive Meg Whitman made it clear that the company still has “the ability to process on compute, storage and networking at the edge.”

The launch of the micro data center seems to align with Whitman’s strategy of transforming HPE into a more agile IT services company as the infrastructure world evolves to cope with increasingly complex and data-intensive workloads. At the same time, it’s also an original take on addressing the growing demand for data center resources. HPE says it’s focusing on “localized content delivery and data analytics,” which addresses enterprises’ needs for greater computing resources at distributed locations. As such, HPE is pitching its micro data center approach as one way to meet those needs, because they can be rapidly spun up and managed remotely.

“This hybrid IT solution integrates data center infrastructure management with HPE OneView IT infrastructure management to provide a single management interface with a converged view of IT and data center facility from a customer’s centralized operations,” HPE said in a statement to Data Center Knowledge.  “In addition to pre-configured architectures, the HPE Micro Datacenter also supports custom configurations to the customers’ business requirements.”

The new micro data center integrates HPE’s IT infrastructure manager OneView, which is designed to provide an operator interface to distributed IT and data center facilities. HPE released OneView 3.0 back in June this year, in order to provide a software-defined tool for managing its BladeSystem and ProLiant servers and its 3Par storage platform. Meanwhile, HPE’s Helion cloud tool is also integrated with the offering to provision physical servers or virtualization clusters.

HPE’s converged data center platform comes with preconfigured architectures, but can also support customized configurations according to user’s requirements. HPE says its micro data center is available now, with pricing dependent on the specific architectural configuration. In addition, HPE offers a “flexible capacity” pay-as-you-go pricing option that lets customers scale their hybrid infrastructure up and down as needed.

More information in this preview video for HPE’s micro data center from last July: