Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced its new Synergy line of servers, its entry into the “composable architecture” market, as well as its its new NFV application catalog.

So what is “composable architecture,” you say? It’s an architecture in which a large server acts as a “pool” of compute, storage, and networking resources, the same way a cloud might. When an application needs resources, they’re allocated from that hardware pool, and when the application goes away, they’re returned from the pool. All of this happens via the composable architecture.

If you’re thinking, “Hmm, that sounds familiar….” you’re right. It’s basically a hardware version of virtualization, and will likely be mostly for high-end applications; most of the rest of the world will be able to achieve the same result with the same software-only approach used by cloud computing.

The announcement set off a kerfuffle between HPE and Dell, which called the venture impractical and said companies were looking for simpler solutions. HPE Vice President Paul Miller countered, saying, ““If you don’t have a composable infrastructure yet, then of course it is not practical for you to sell one.”

The Synergy line will be available in the second quarter of next year.

In other news, HPE has opened the VNF catalog section of its new OpenNFV Portal. The catalog provides a searchable database of pre-validated Virtualized Networking Functions, with more functionality expected next year.

The company also announced the opening of the Cloud 28+ cloud service catalog, which “lists 680 cloud services from 150 members across the range of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings,” according to BusinessCloudNews.