With the industry’s attention focused on the new storage and converged infrastructure solutions introduced at its annual Discover conference, Hewlett-Packard Co. has slipped in a landmark partnership with Chef Inc. that checks another box on its software-defined data center to-do list.

The company formerly known as Opscode Inc. re-branded itself late last year to the name of its flagship configuration management solution, which frees up practitioners from manually repeating common operations. The open-source software abstracts the nuances of individual components such as servers, load balancers and databases into “resources” that are managed using scripts written in the popular Ruby language that define how each should behave through the different stages of the management lifecycle. That includes everything from the initial deployment and configuration to ongoing maintenance.

Chef’s motto of “turning infrastructure into code” fits nicely with what HP aims to deliver through its promise of software-defined storage, which shares the goals of automating administration and helping IT professionals address application requirements more effectively. But the partnership between the companies extends further than that to encompass the entire data center.

Under the agreement, HP will incorporate Chef into its infrastructure automation portfolio, which combines operational solutions with professional services into a bundled package that promises to help organizations run their environments more efficiently. Consultancy is hardly the first item that comes to mind upon hearing the term “software-defined data center,” but it’s a growing piece of the puzzle in the outsourcing era.

With all the buzz around programmable hardware, organizations may rightfully expect vendors to deliver professional services with the same standard of agility they promise to provide at the infrastructure layer. The alliance with Chef brings HP a step closer to reaching that goal, adding an extensive roster of automation capabilities that hold the potential to radically shrink the army of consultancies typically associated with large-scale enterprise projects.

Yet the partnership could prove the most beneficial for Chef, which is gaining access to the thousands of organizations that buy professional services from HP. For now, that’s a major advantage over arch-rival Puppet Labs Inc., although it may not last if HP is really committed to freedom of choice for its DevOps customers.