HP Strengthens Hybrid Cloud Portfolio

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HP (NYSE: HPQ) is building out its cloud computing portfolio this week with the announcement of new services and products. The computer giant has been an aggressive proponent of the cloud, with an emphasis on hybrid solutions designed to bridge the gap between traditional IT infrastructure and both public and private cloud alternatives.

Today’s news includes a “private cloud as a service” offering from HP that delivers compute services from HP’s data centers. The new HP Enterprise Cloud Services-Compute offering lets IT establish specified policies for service, performance, security and privacy as well as provide scalable capacity.

“What we’re doing is bringing enterprise class computing to the cloud. We look at it from a customer perspective that not one size fits all,” Patrick Harr, vice president of Enterprise Cloud Solutions at HP, told InternetNews.com. “Customers can deploy mission critical applications without all the management headaches of the data center.”

Another part of the announcement is the HP CloudSystem, a turnkey approach to simplifying cloud deployment. “With CloudSystem we want to help customer build turnkey private clouds for the enterprise as well as turnkey system for the public cloud,” said Harr. “We’re providing the ability to manage private clouds, traditional IT services and public clouds like Amazon’s EC2.

CloudSystem also supports HP Cloud Maps, a set of automated, pre-configured templates designed to help quickly deploy legacy systems such as Microsoft Exchange, Oracle and SAP enterprise applications into HP’s cloud infrastructure. HP said it’s offering 18 templates at launch.

HP’s announcement builds on services HP introduced last year as part of its HP Instant-On Enterprises initiative. HP also offers a package of products and services called CloudStart designed to simplify private cloud deployments in a 30-day timeframe.

Another part of HP’s announcement is the HP Cloud Discovery Workshop. These one- or two-day workshops cover such topics as the business model implications of moving to the cloud, security and choosing the right services.

Harr said the workshop covers such issues as potential problems with relying on public cloud services. “You might have an extended compute service or some other service on a public cloud that was started without really anticipating the bandwidth charges over time,” said Harr. “We can help companies figure out if makes more sense to keep a service on a private cloud and help them develop a roadmap for cloud services as well as what applications are better off staying in traditional infrastructure.”

Borrowing the title of an old Eagles song, Harr said HP’s workshop and consulting service can help avoid the Hotel California problem. “The cloud isn’t suited for every application, and you don’t want to get in and then be locked in or not able to get out,” he said.

David Needle is the West Coast bureau chief at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.