Cloud hopes fly high for HP with expanded portfolio
By Gabey Goh December 6, 2012
- HP extends Converged Cloud portfolio for hybrid delivery environments touting agility, speed, innovation and lower costs
- Study reveals 75% of business and IT executives plan to pursue a hybrid delivery model.
ON THE third day of HP Discover, the company unveiled additions and enhancements to its Converged Cloud portfolio, signaling an aggressive push into the market.
“HP is committed to delivering cloud capabilities that enterprises can rely on,” HP chief operating officer Bill Veghte said during his presentation at the plenary hall of Messe Frankfurt.
He cited a study conducted by Coleman Parkes Research for HP which highlighted a growing need for solutions that span traditional, private, managed and public cloud environments.
Respondents indicated that 75% of business and IT executives plan to pursue a hybrid delivery model. At the same time, 65% are concerned with vendor lock-in, and 72% said that portability of workloads between cloud models is important to their cloud implementations.
“We eat our own dog food. By that I mean we’re going to provide cloud services as well which means that on our balance sheet, we’re not only building the components but we’re living and breathing the same thing we’re asking you to do and our partners to do. Providing world-class cloud services for consumption,” he said.
In addition, HP shared that it currently has 850 customers for its CloudSystem offering, 200 customers for its Managed Cloud services, 2000 for its Public Cloud offering and has 50 CloudAgile service providers worldwide.
On stage to share insight into their own experiences with cloud computing was a customer panel which included Merritte Stidston, director, Development Center Strategy & Operations for healthcare technology solutions provider McKesson Corp.
Stidston pointed out that it is “absolutely key” to have all partners, internal and external, on board in the cloud journey.
“You need to work in this converged infrastructure market where you’re working with other teams across your enterprise. Silos are inhibitors,” he said, adding that there was also an increasing need for enterprises to have more dynamic teams with cross-functional skills.
“The other thing is, you must have a very clearly defined plan. It sounds simple but as they say, people don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan. So have clear objectives as you move through the plan,” said Stidston.
Portfolio breakdown
“Today’s announcements enable customers to more affordably and easily take advantage of the agility of the cloud without jeopardizing their enterprise service level agreements,” said Veghte (pic).
The new cloud solutions announced by HP span private, managed and public cloud environments and include:
- The release of HP CloudSystem 7.2, with enhancements such as KVM support leveraging OpenStack technology, bursting options expand hybrid delivery use cases,automatic provisioning of security controls; with over 200 Cloud Maps now available including HP Data Protector.
- HP Cloud Service Automation (CSA) 3.1, an enterprise –grade cloud management platform featuring support for OpenStack/KVM in addition to M/S Hyper-V and VMware, highly available cloud management architecture and security with HP Tipping Point CloudArmour integration
- HP Continuous Delivery Automation (CDA) 1.1, a single tool for managing applications from development to production, aimed at accelerating the application release cycle. HP claims it can achieve application deployment success rates as high as 95%.
The company also announced updates to its HP Cloud Services, which offer public cloud services in the areas of compute, storage and application platform as a service.
- HP Cloud Compute is now available. The pay-as-you-go model that allows users to deploy and customize compute instances on demand. Starting at US$0.04 per hour, the service will be offered with a service level agreement of at least 99.95% on a monthly basis or fewer than 30 minutes downtime per month.
- HP Cloud Block Storage is now in public beta. Starting at US$0.10 per GB per month, it allows users to easily move data from one compute instance to another. This high-performance, persistent storage solution is intended for applications requiring frequent data access such as web applications. The service will be discounted 50% during the public beta period.
In addition, two new industry offerings for communication service providers (CSPs) and manufacturers.
- HP cloud solutions for CSPs features business and productivity applications, enhancements to the HP IaaS Domain Gateway and Aggregation Platform for SaaS Marketplace Portal architecture (AP4SaaS) and Enterprise Cloud Services for CSPs (Managed and Hosting). In addition it features HP Cloud IVR (interactive voice response) to enable CSPs to consolidate their IVRs and run them in the cloud to reduce costs, improve efficiency and business flexibility.
- HP Global Product Authentication Service, a cloud-based track-and-trace solution based on technology that has been used to fight the global problem of counterfeit and stolen drugs.
“We’re not standing still. We have a strategy, we have an architectural approach and we are driving that innovation agenda,” said Veghte.
More reports from Gabey Goh of Digital News Asia on HP Discover in Frankfurt, Germany:
Meg Whitman seeks to answer: 'What is HP?'
