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Hewlett-Packard is bringing managed storage services to its Helion cloud computing platform, the latest move in its efforts to rapidly expand its infrastructure-as-a-service offerings.
HP officials this week introduced Helion Managed Storage to help organizations deal with the rapidly growing amount of data they need to store and the increasing associated costs of doing it themselves. The tech giant is offering a range of services that, like other Helion solutions, can be deployed in a hybrid fashion—on premises, in a hosted private cloud environment or in a public cloud hosted by HP or a partner.
The goal is to give businesses a managed solution they can deploy in whatever way they need, that is secure and manageable and is cost-efficient, officials said. HP estimates that enterprises are seeing a 25 percent annual increase in the demands on their storage infrastructures, forcing them to increase capacity in anticipation of that growth by buying storage they might not always need.
With HP’s Helion Managed Storage services, businesses will get the storage capabilities they need in an infrastructure environment that is flexible and scalable, and can be paid for as demand grows.
“Our Helion offerings are unique from other industry services due to the simplification of file management and interface, performance scalability options and availability of backup services for servers and personal devices,” Jim Fanella, vice president of workload and cloud for HP’s Enterprise Services unit, said in a statement.
The services include block storage, which will be accessed through fiber connections, for applications and databases that demand high levels of performance, and file storage, a network-attached storage option that is connected via IP networks. Backup services are offered through HP’s 3Par StoreServ Storage and StoreOnce Backup systems, the company said.
Through its Helion efforts, HP is looking to compete with other major infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers, such as Amazon Web Services, IBM, Google and Microsoft. The company in May introduced Helion—based on its work with the open-source OpenStack cloud orchestration technology—and announced that it will invest $1 billion over the next two years in R&D around the cloud, OpenStack and Helion.
“Helion is an umbrella brand across all of our cloud portfolio,” Kerry Bailey, senior vice president of sales at HP, told eWEEK when the solution was announced. “Not that a brand like Helion will replace the word ‘cloud,’ but we need to begin to think beyond cloud and what these business solutions do. We need to rise above the whole cloud hype that is pervasive across our whole industry.”
CEO Meg Whitman in May told analysts and journalists that “Helion is changing the game in cloud by allowing the integration of public, private, managed cloud and traditional IT environments on an open and secure platform. We are addressing a major pain point for the enterprise customers with Helion and the early interest has been very positive.”
The company in late May rolled out a private cloud platform for government agencies based on Helion, and last week introduced the Helion Network aimed at creating an ecosystem of software developers and vendors as well as channel partners around the Helion effort.