Salesforce.com has teamed up with HP to create dedicated Salesforce cloud instances running on the IT vendor's converged infrastructure.

The two firms will jointly develop and market the product, which will be called Salesforce Superpod. Once out, its first customer is going to be HP, according to the vendor itself.

HP's converged infrastructure is a group of hardware and software products integrated to provide full-stack IT infrastructure solutions. They range from blade or rack servers, storage arrays and network switches to IT management software.

Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com chairman and CEO, called the partnership a breakthrough in cloud computing. “The Salesforce Superpod will allow individual customers to have a dedicated instance in the Salesforce multi-tenant cloud, powered by HP’s technology and fully managed within Salesforce.com’s world-class data centers,” he said.

Meg Whitman, president and CEO of HP, said, “By jointly developing and using each other’s technology, the Salesforce Superpod will deliver the highest standard in performance, reliability and management. HP intends to be the first customer of the Salesforce Superpod.”

The Salesforce Superpod will be available at an additional fee to salesforce.com's largest customers, the companies said.

The Salesforce.com cloud suffered a major outage last Friday, caused by a failure during a routine operating system patch applied to DNS servers in the company's Chicago and Washington data centers. The outage lasted for about five hours, affecting customers internationally, according to the company's health status dashboard.