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HP offers enterprise cloud service

Plus cloud-building infrastructure

HP is offering its own Enterprise Cloud Services directly to enterprises, and announcing a cloud infrastructure building service based on a hybrid delivery model.

HP says its hybrid delivery is an integration of traditional IT with private and public cloud services based on service level agreements (SLAs). It wants to offer a so-called full spectrum of services – such as transforming applications and managing and monitoring cloud services – to help businesses move into their own-built private clouds as well as using public clouds. The main pitch is that businesses can use this hybrid delivery to become so-called "Instant-On" businesses, starting up new offerings of goods and/or services in hours, even minutes, instead of days, weeks and months.

The Enterprise Cloud Services-Compute runs in HP's own data centres and the IT company claims that it is flexible, saleable and automated. It can be a managed or un-managed service and is built for running production-grade applications, HP says.

Amazon EC2 was characterised by HP as being oriented to developers and small and medium business and not suitable for enterprise use. Its security, reliability and compliance aspects are not good enough, HP claimed, for enterprise production apps.

HP is going to offer additional Enterprise Cloud Services in the future, with tailored ones for mail and messaging, ERP, CRM and database mentioned.

If customers don't want to use HP's public cloud, they can build their own private clouds with HP's CloudSystem. This is an integrated stack combining HP's Converged Infrastructure hardware and system software (Blade System Matrix plus networking plus storage).

The company also announced a ready-made set of services – called Cloud Service Automation – for the CloudSystem. Ian Brooks, HP's EMEA head of innovation, said: "It's like cloud on auto-pilot," and involves pre-built-templates which users select from a catalog. An example given was of 3PAR storage combined with TippingPoint.

The "automated" offering enables customers to initiate a self-service cloud portal and service catalog as well as providing them with tools to manage the design and deployment of cloud services, manage cloud service level agreements, and manage "heterogeneous physical, virtual, private and public resources" and/or a hybrid environment.

The hardware environment is X86, as that is at the heart of BladeSystem Matrix.

HP said that the CloudSystem will integrate with its Enterprise Cloud Services, emphasising the hybrid delivery model.

HP is also offering one-day Cloud Discovery workshops for C-level executives to enable them to discuss the hows and whys of cloud computing, and, hopefully, transform their enterprises to gain the cloud benefits of reduced capital and operating expenditures (CAPE and OPEX).

There are a number of initiatives under way in HP to extend its cloud offerings to small and medium businesses.

Enterprise Cloud Services-Compute will be available in February. Cloud Service Automation and the Cloud Discovery Workshop are available now. ®

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