HP Adds New Hybrid Cloud Packages to Its Catalog

Hewlett-Packard has launched a plethora of cloud-based IT packages during the last three years. These include such diverse offerings as cloud-based management for smartphones, a hosted business-application service (Cloud Assure), and cloud-based mobile-printing services, among others.

On Jan. 25, HP added to that catalog of IT products and services some new hybrid cloud packages, which come under the HP moniker of Hybrid Delivery Cloud, in order to get more granular about what its potential customers may want.

These new products and services are being mingled with some of HP's previously announced solutions in some cases.

With the new offerings, HP is positioning itself in the cloud-computing business for midrange and small and midsized businesses as the purveyor of so-called "Instant-On" enterprise computing. The thinking behind this marketing label is that cloud computing-in this case, of course, HP's-requires little or no capital investment, features speedier and simpler deployments than any sort of client-server system, and is easier to dial up and down as workloads ebb and flow.

Still, there is HP hardware required to use some of these new things-such as ProLiant and Integrity servers-depending on the IT requirements of the user. So it's not all about swiping a credit card and using a cloud service.

HP's new hybrid cloud packages include:

--HP Enterprise Cloud Services-Compute: This is designed for specified levels of performance, uptime, security and privacy. It makes bundles of server, storage, network and security resources available to be consumed as a service; no new hardware is required off the top, but with services expansion, that could change. 

--HP CloudSystem:  This cloud offering runs on HP's Cloud Service Automation and BladeSystem Matrix products, so you need to buy HP servers to deploy it. CloudSystem's No. 1 feature is broad application support.

--HP Cloud Service Automation: Announced in 2010, this is a core management stack for private and public cloud environments. It enables enterprises to manage cloud services with one-touch provisioning and monitoring. It, too, requires an HP server or servers.

--HP CloudMaps: These are templates that help automate the provisioning and automation of the above products and services.

--HP Cloud Discovery Workshop: Also announced in 2010, this service helps enterprises develop a holistic cloud strategy. The workshop is enhanced with a focus in cloud economics, applications and cloud security in addition to topics around transformation journey, cloud concepts, service portfolio, governance, organization and cloud infrastructure.

Sandeep Johri, HP's vice president of strategy and industry solutions, told eWEEK that "this is all designed to be a turnkey solution for enterprises to deploy private clouds, or for service providers to deploy public clouds."

Security, always the No. 1 point of contention in cloud-computing systems, is handled by a range of choices, Johri said.

"The systems can be deployed as a direct extension of your internal environment, where you can specify the geographic location of the system, you can specify the restoring and backup level you need, the auditing level you need, and so on," Johri said. "On our hosting side, HP of course has first-class security options."