HP has finally gotten really serious about its cloud
offerings, which is a very good move for them and the industry. After all, they have been a major industry force
for decades. Not all of their initiatives have worked out and the company has
certainly seen turmoil in its management. However, things seem to have settled
down, thus allowing HP to more closely focus attention on offerings for the
next several years including, most definitely, cloud.
HP’s basic Cloud strategy is unchanged, i.e. to be the
leader in the hybrid cloud space for enterprises. They assume customers operate
in highly heterogeneous environments, and need solutions that reduce
operational and management complexity. Their plan is to deliver full support
for hybrid clouds with hardware, software, management tools and a full suite of
consulting services. HP will create an enterprise-class public cloud as part of
its hybrid cloud strategy – on a single platform (Cloud OS / OpenStack) and
able to be managed from a single pane of glass.
HP recognizes that multiple companies are offering cloud services
and their plans must reflect situational reality. Most enterprises operate a
mix of traditional IT, internally built clouds and external clouds from
different vendors. Some clouds will have been installed by user departments
without involving central IT. Most IT staffs struggle at managing the mix. HP
plans are specifically targeted and designed to cope with this “mess” or “hybrid
hell” as HP puts it. We believe customers will welcome with open arms a
vendor that successfully delivers on that promise.
HP’s own Cloud offering is built on OpenStack, of which
are an original member and major contributor (with IBM, Rackspace, Red Hat,
Dell and many others). Oracle has recently joined.
Another view of this situation sees the rest of the
industry joining forces against Amazon. Over time it will be an interesting
test of an Open Source platform against a proprietary solution. Customers will
benefit from this competition.
Starting from an OpenStack base, HP will test and add to
create an enterprise-ready product; tested to assure strong performance on their
hardware. Although not significantly different from what others are doing, it leverages
HP’s experiences and understanding of enterprise customers’ needs. Many
companies offering public clouds today have little or no real experience in selling to or satisfying the
enterprise market. HP does.
The IT industry is subject to periodic enthusiastic waves
of interest in new technologies. But, there should be no doubt that no single technology
can satisfy all requirements. Not all workloads
will run in and benefit from the cloud.
HP has identified six workloads that they believe will benefit and where
they will focus their efforts:
- Development and test
- Cloud Apps delivery and hosting
- Analytics
- Business continuity and compliance
- Technical computing
- IT infrastructure
HP uses these workloads to further classify the type of
customer jobs they address. Their added-value comes from helping customers
develop the right strategies to apply cloud technology to solve workload issues.
Let’s now turn to the five just announced products and
services. See Table 1.
New Cloud
Offerings
Offering
Comment
Hybrid Cloud
Professional Services
|
Key component of HP’s
Strategy
|
New HP Cloud
|
Built on OpenStack
|
Virtual Private
Cloud
|
Gives choice of
physical and virtual configurations, network, etc.
|
Management Platform
for Hybrid Cloud
|
Needed to control heterogeneous
Clouds
|
HP Flexible
Capacity
|
Not really a Cloud
offering but fits in well.
|
Table 1
The last two offerings merit a few words. HP’s Cloud
management platform includes HP Cloud Service Automation version 4 for
automated management of both public and private cloud environments. A key attraction
of HP offerings is their ability to co-exist and work with third-party tools in
heterogeneous public clouds e.g. mixing HP, Amazon and Microsoft clouds.
Support for hybrid clouds means a customer can manage multiple
vendors’ SLAs. If this lives up to HP’s
promises, it will be a clear winner and very attractive to customers. It is a
major step toward reducing the complexity of multiple cloud offerings.
HP’s Flexible Capacity Services allows a customer to install
HP equipment in their datacenter while HP retains title to the equipment. The
customer pays only for the usage not ownership. This may become an attractive
offering; but, contract details will determine the real payoff. It will take time to determine how this will
work in practice.
We like HP’s acknowledgement that they are unlikely to be
the sole choice as a cloud provider in today’s rapidly maturing market. This
reality-based view and the resulting solutions portfolio will help to gain them
a presence in many shops.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteEach business begins with an arrangement and on the off chance that you take a stab at advertising of Hp Products items without any promoting method you will get debilitated.Hp Consultants provides various equipments related to technology which anyone can buy or sell.
ReplyDelete