HP Strengthens its Cloud Offering with Converged Cloud for Hybrid Enterprise Environments

HP today announced the launch of the HP Converged Cloud, which promises to create, manage and secure hybrid cloud environments. The initiative is the part of HP’s operational change plans recently put by CEO Meg Whitman.

Designed for the enterprise and termed as the first industry strategy and portfolio based cloud solution on a single architecture, HP Converged Cloud benefits extend to infrastructure, applications and information and enable companies to deploy their projects either on a private cloud, public cloud or even on machines hosted by a competing supplier.

HP Converged Cloud is built on HP’s Software Management and Information Security Convergence solutions and OpenStack open source technology.

The integration of open source technology through OpenStack offers more choice, convenience and flexibility for business customers, so they are not locked with a single supplier. In addition, the Converged Cloud is built on a standards-based approach for working in a partner ecosystem.

“The convergence of cloud computing and mobile connectivity is changing the way infrastructures are built, applications are developed and information is delivered,” said Bill Veghte, chief strategy officer and executive vice president, Software, HP. “HP Converged Cloud enables enterprises to incorporate a blend of public, private and managed cloud services with their existing IT to create a seamless hybrid environment that rapidly adapts to their changing requirements.”

In a press release statement, the company promised a public beta service will be available from May 10 and their first offering would be infrastructure as a service (IaaS). HP does not specify prices for the use of its development, but will not charge you for subscribing to the service and for its actual use. The company’s goal is to provide computing instances or virtual machines on demand, expandable online storage capacity and cached content to end users.

HP will support all major hypervisors, operating systems and development environments. This will enable customers the freedom to migrate applications more efficiently to new infrastructure or to cloud services from other providers. The HP Converged Cloud can host Microsoft Hyper-V VMs, VMware ESX Server virtual machines, Red Hat KVM and other hypervisors offering.

“We’ve got lots of intellectual property, lots of products, and expertise at running things at scale,” said Veghte. “There is a new wave of cloud and mobile computing, and big data, and there is a gap between what businesses need and what information technology is delivering.”

Among the new features that make up the portfolio are the HP Cloud Services. The cloud services will support advantages like MYSQL relational database and block storage facilities for users to move data from one virtual machine to other.

The other offering, CloudSystem, will have pre-defined templates of the existing cloud services configuration and will save the design time implementation for first time cloud users.

HP Service Virtualization 2.0 allows the customer to verify the quality and performance of cloud and mobile applications without interrupting normal system operation. In addition, its framework can be viewed on certain HP services in a virtual environment.

With the launch of new cloud services to corporate clients, HP aims to compete more effectively with other providers of similar services – IBM, Amazon, Rackspace Hosting, and others.