Hewlett-Packard announced a pre-configured and pre-tested system designed to make it easier and faster for organizations to deploy and manage their private clouds. The new offerings, announced March 24, expand the vendor’s Helion cloud portfolio and come at a time when enterprise IT departments are under increasing pressure to build more flexible infrastructures faster.
Pre-configured platforms like HP’s Helion Rack reduce design and development work for users launching private clouds, according to Bill Hilf, senior vice president of product management for HP’s Helion business.
“Enterprise customers are asking for private clouds that meet their security, reliability and performance requirements, while also providing the openness, flexibility and fast time-to-value they require,” Hilf said in a statement. Helion Rack gives enterprises “the simplified cloud experience they want, with the control and performance they need,” he said.
HP launched its Helion cloud platform in May 2014. The platform is based on its work with the OpenStack open-source cloud orchestration technology. HP also offers its own platform-as-a-service (PaaS) technology called the Helion Developer Platform, plus Helion VPC Lean, a cloud service for midsize businesses looking to move app development, testing and other work to a managed IaaS environments.
HP has steadily grown its lineup of pre-configured infrastructure offerings, recently rolling out seven new pre-configured solutions for workloads ranging from business class apps to analytics.
The Helion Rack—a 42U (73.5-inch) rack armed with ProLiant DL360 Gen9 servers as well as networking—offers integrated infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-service (PaaS) capabilities. It comes with OpenStack capabilities and HP’s Helion Development Platform, which is based on the open-source Cloud Foundry PaaS software.
The use of open-source software and industry-standard hardware helps speed up private cloud deployments, and the solution is installed on site by HP technicians, according to the company.
It’s also designed for easy scaling, which is done by adding storage and compute nodes.
The Helion Rack will be available next month, with pricing varying depending on the configuration.