While Citrix’s moves ahead with CloudStack and its abandonment of the OpenStack cloud computing platform dominated the news recently, let’s not forget that OpenStack has enormous backing and a well-funded foundation forming around it. In our post “OpenStack’s Partnerships Give it a Leg Up in the Cloud Race,” we detailed some of the many tech companies that are developing around the OpenStack platform.
Hewlett-Packard, for example, has announced its Converged Cloud services and platform tools, based on a “hardened” version of OpenStack. And now, HP is ready to deliver the public beta version of its HP Cloud Services, which could mean a lot for the struggling company.
HP has delivered public, open beta versions of three OpenStack-based services: Cloud Compute, Cloud Object Storage and Cloud Content Delivery Network. Users will pay only for the services they consume, and while HP has gone out of its way to position its services as different from Amazon’s you can bet that HP will be competing closely with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the cloud.
Along with HP’s announcement, there are many partners and supporters making related announcements. Opscode, which specializes in cloud infrastructure automation, has announced integration with HP Cloud Services. And Standing Cloud, a provider of cloud application management solutions, has announced support. Standing Cloud offers a simple way to deploy, manage and distribute applications in the cloud. You can find the full details on HP’s partner community here.
HP’s pricing is very fully disclosed as seen here, and the pricing looks like it will be very competitive with what Amazon and other cloud platform players charge. Of course, we’ve made the point before that in the cloud, everything will come down to support. Many of the companies “backing” OpenStack are contributing code or pursuing other forms of community contribution, but a unified, robust support effort is what will really make a difference.
HP Cloud Support is up and running, and you can find more details on it here. Can HP become a major player in the cloud by betting on a flexible, open source platform? We’re about to see, and this should be interesting to watch.
