Enhancements Made to HP's Cloud Portfolio
Enhancements Made to HP's Cloud Portfolio by UCStrategies Staff
New services and programs have been added to Hewlett-Packard's Converged Cloud portfolio; these added features include channel partners receiving more help, and will allow HP to provide private, public and hybrid clouds to clients.
Enterprise customers and solution providers will be able to better manage and deliver their services over differing cloud environments as a result of the new Converged Cloud, HP announced at the Discover 2012 conference in Frankfurt, Germany.
The manager for cloud solutions at HP, Frances Guida, states that in a survey of 500 enterprise customers, 75 percent of them were found to make use of cloud services; this included a mixture of private, public and managed clouds.
Guida said: “We feel that what these clients need to cope with in this hybrid environment is continuity across these different environments. We are driving all our products in this direction, and we're building a common technology based on leveraging open technology.”
The additional features to HP CloudSystem allows HP solution providers to build and manage cloud, and broaden programs which already exist.
The number of templates for HP's Cloud Maps program was increased by 30 percent, and this offers more that 200 templates to its catalogue. New programs like Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint can be added by partners to their cloud services provisions for customers, enhancing their user experience.
Also provided by the HP CloudSystem is service lifecycle management and support for KVM virtual machines and bursting capability. This is the ability to fully utilize the computing capacity of service providers.
According to Guida, more that 850 customers use CloudSystem, and most of these are served by channel partners.
A management platform will be made available to partners through the HP Cloud Service Automation, and they will be able to deliver HP cloud services over various clouds. HP has also decreased the service deployment time from months to minutes; this means that users can manage on-demand application and infrastructure services.
The move to general availability of HP Cloud Compute from beta was also announced; this is HP's infrastructure-as-a-service offering.
The prices of Cloud Compute stand at $0.04 per hour, and will have service-level agreements of a 99.95 percent minimum (meaning a downtime of less than 30 minutes a month), according to Guida. (CY) Link