Hewlett-Packard is releasing another set of preconfigured cloud infrastructure solutions aimed at particular workloads to accelerate customer adoption of the vendor’s Helion private cloud offering.
The seven new pre-priced configurations, announced Feb. 12, touch on an array of lighter enterprise workloads and more business-class applications, ranging from application development to data mining and analytics. The standardized infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings are part of HP’s Helion Managed Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) offering, which officials with the tech vendor said is designed to help business in their migration to the cloud.
Helion also gives HP a platform with which to compete with such top-tier cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Rackspace.
HP in May 2014 announced the Helion platform, which is based on the company’s work with the OpenStack open-source cloud-management technology. At the same time, the company unveiled its own platform-as-a-service (PaaS) technology called the Helion Developer Platform. In August, the company released Helion VPC Lean, a cloud service that is aimed at midsize businesses and enterprises that are looking to move such jobs as application development, software testing and workplace collaboration onto managed IaaS environments.
HP also has launched a Helion private cloud offering for government agencies as well as for storage tasks.
The company is putting a lot of money and effort behind its cloud efforts, with officials last year saying HP will spend $1 billion over two years for R&D around the cloud, Helion and OpenStack. The new standardized configurations are designed to make it easier for businesses to bring their workloads to the Helion cloud, according to Jim Fanella, vice president of workload and the cloud at HP Enterprise Services.
“Customers want a simplified experience when finding and implementing workload specific solutions in the cloud,” Fanella said in a statement. “Creating pre-configured solutions for the most frequently used workloads makes it easier to quickly implement managed VPC solutions and help ease the organization”s transition to the New Style of IT.”
There are four virtual server configurations for the lighter workloads, and three more physical server configurations for business-critical applications, according to HP officials. All the configurations include OpenStack features, a range of options for adding high availability capabilities, and advisory and application transformation help for bringing workloads to the cloud.
The standardized configurations aim at workloads such as application development, file print and quality assurance; SharePoint, unified communications and custom tools; non-critical customer relationship management (CRM); hosted email and enterprise CRM; Oracle CX customer experience, data mining and analytics; data warehousing; and SAP applications, Microsoft Dynamics business solutions and Sage Software business management workloads.
HP in April will expand the list of pre-configured solutions for Helion VPC, according to officials.
The new pre-configured solutions are available now, with pricing for virtual configurations starting at $76 per month for a bare metal system up to $496 per month for the vendor’s Virtualized Enterprise environment. Physical configurations start at $800 a month for eight-core physical servers and rise to $1,000 a month for a Physical Enterprise environment.