HP Cloud Announcement: HP Hybrid Delivery

by James Vastbinder
Yesterday HP announced HP Hybrid Delivery which is a complete compute infrastructure intended to compete with Amazon AWS or Rackspace's offerings.  HP refers to it as a converged infrastructure architectural model where they provide the entire compute/management stack to host applications in the cloud.  HP's offering attempts to differentiate itself from current offerings in several different ways.
The Offerings
Enterprise Cloud Services - Compute features:
  • Storage Management - support and monitoring of HP SAN
  • Network Management - monitoring and management of all network components
  • Incident and Change Management - Initial point-of-entry support for incidents and change control
  • Facilities Management - physical facility management
  • HP Enterprise Cloud Services Portal - administration portal providing operational visibility, performance and configuration parameters
  • Supports Windows and most Linux distributions
HP CloudSystem is a re-launch of previous announced services aggregated into a collection to provide services across private clouds, public and hybrid cloud environments using HP's Cloud Service Automation to manage the infrastructure, both on-premises and in the cloud.
HP Cloud Discovery Workshop is a training series which can be delivered over one or two days led by HP Services.
The Differences
One main difference from AWS appears to be the ability to run workloads on physical computers managed by HP vs virtual machines which only Rackspace currently supports among the Cloud mega-vendors.  As another differentiator, HP provides two service-level agreements allowing customers the choice of managing their own instances or having HP provide management:
  • HP Managed Server - a complete management, monitoring and maintenance solution so customers need not worry about the operating system.
  • Client Managed Server - only initial OS installation provided, from that point forward the customer maintains and secure the OS including licensing of the OS.
HP is focusing on the hybrid cloud computing model expecting significant investment in both private and public clouds, per Thomas Hogan, EVP Enterprise Sales:
We’re focused on providing a foundation of infrastructure and assets. Within the next few years one-quarter of all information will be delivered by private clouds, and one-quarter by public clouds — by 2014 the commercial ecosystem around the cloud will be worth $100 billion.
While HP may be a bit late in delivering their cloud offering compared to competitors, through the EDS acquisition they have been in the hosting business for many years and in combination with their proven enterprise data center experience will bring leadership to the managed private cloud space.

via http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/01/hp-hybrid-delivery