HP Announces Its OpenStack-Based Public Cloud Offering
HP Announces Its OpenStack-Based Public Cloud Offering by UCStrategies Staff
Hewlett-Packard announces its HP Cloud Compute, a public cloud platform touted to be ideal for big data workloads and complex deployments. HP Cloud Compute runs on OpenStack, an open-source cloud operating system.
HP Cloud Compute is a public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering. It is similar and competes with Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) and Rackspace’s Open Cloud. The HP Cloud Compute software is based on OpenStack Compute (formally known as Nova), the chief element of any IaaS model and is also the cloud-computing aspect that directly competes with AWS’ EC2 platform.
At ReadWrite, Brian Proffitt had high hopes and some misgivings about HP Cloud Compute being based on OpenStack, pointing out that the only other commercial implementation of the cloud OS before HP’s new public cloud was Rackspace’s Open Cloud service.
Proffitt also argued that it was only fitting for HP to be the first outside vendor to release a commercial OpenStack-based public cloud platform. HP was one of the first non-Rackspace vendors to patronize OpenStack after Rackspace said that it would open the code.
He then went on to explain that a three-way battle involving AWS/Eucalyptus, OpenStack, and CloudStack is now underway due to HP’s announcement of this general release.
Brian Proffitt raised three key issues:
One, the success of HP Cloud Compute is largely based on how well HP provides the service and strategizes its pricing. Being the first to market is not an indicator of success, as evidenced by Sony’s Betamax, Atari, and Palm. Proffitt positively remarked on HP’s minimum of four cents per hour and the 99.95 percent uptime in the service level agreement.
Two, there are lots of possible competitors emerging. There’s Rackspace already pushing OpenStack-based products. Then there’s the presence of Linux-based vendors such as Red Hat and SUSE. Since HP is a hardware-oriented company offering cloud services, there can be an advantage to being an OS vendor competing against a hardware-oriented one. Proffitt highlighted the need to deploy an OpenStack private-cloud option because running OpenStack-based software in a firewall meant spending days to configure systems. The reason is that there is no “unified package” that can be downloaded and installed yet.
And finally, there’s the matter with HP and the company’s recent public mishaps like the accounting fraud that came with the $11 billion Autonomy acquisition and its dismal quarter earnings. It takes a lot of work to persuade customers that it can be a good public-cloud company. (KOM) Link. Link