HP Expands Cloud Services

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The cloud isn’t just about infrastructure, it’s about services too.

HP today is enhancing its HP Cloud offering with several new services and a partner program aimed at growing the cloud market. The new services include cloud monitoring, load balancing and DNS services.

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Dan Baigent, Senior Director, Product Development, Cloud Services at HP, explained to Datamation that the new services are all software based. The load balancing service was built by HP leveraging raw code from HP as well as some open source components.

The core open source component used by HP for its Cloud Load Balancing as a service is the HAproxy project.

“What we have built is a set of extensions that make HAproxy function as a service so you can incorporate it into an application via an API call,” Baigent said.

Baigent noted that HP has been doing DNS and monitoring on the HP Cloud, for HP’s own use in order to actually operate the cloud. HP’s Cloud service is based on the OpenStack platform.

By offering DNS and cloud monitoring as a service, HP is extending existing internal services and capabilities. Baigent noted that all of HP Cloud’s services are pay-per-use to enable users to get up and running quickly.

The new HP Cloud services are not intended for use on other cloud vendor infrastructure.

“Someone could go into the business of providing cross cloud platform DNS as a service provider, but that’s not something, we’re interested in doing,” Baigent said. “What we need to be able to do is extend our infrastructure services in meaningful ways, to help customers and developers make enterprise-class workloads really work in the cloud.”

Security

Security is often cited as a cause for concern when it comes to cloud adoption. While HP, as part of the new services rollout, is not providing a specific Cloud security as a service offering, Baigent noted that HP has many partners that provide security solutions.

“We leave room for our partner ecosystem to provide services that customers need and want,” Baigent said.

Reselling the Cloud

While HP’s Cloud can be simply acquired by any user with a credit card, HP also wants to enable its sales channel and Value Added Resellers (VARs) to sell the cloud as well. HP is now launching a program that will reward VARs for referring customers ot the HP cloud. “VARs are used to selling applications and technology in raw form,” Baigent said. ” A public cloud in raw form is not that interesting.”

HP’s partner program for cloud resellers is about enabling the VARs to be more relevant as customers try and figure out how to take advantage of the cloud.

“Our effort is about helping the VARs to create a more end-to-end story with their customers about cloud use,” Baigent said.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.