HP unveils Cloud innovations

HP has expanded its cloud portfolio with new solutions and services that offer enterprises greater agility, simplified management and improved security for their hybrid environments.

As enterprises embrace new delivery models, one of the biggest decisions chief information officers (CIOs) need to make on their cloud journey is determining where applications or workloads should live—on traditional IT or in the cloud. Often, applications will continue to live across multiple environments, and hybrid delivery becomes an imperative. Research indicates that 40 percent of enterprises say they are currently in a hybrid environment and 75 percent of IT executives plan to pursue a hybrid cloud delivery model by 2016.

HP is focused on delivering hybrid solutions that bridge traditional IT with private, public and managed clouds. New solutions announced this week build on this strategy, including the introduction of the next-generation HP CloudSystem, HP’s flagship offering for building and managing private clouds.

HP was recently ranked as a leader in the Forrester Wave report for Private Cloud Solutions:
“HP leads the pack. [It provides] a clean and navigable interface that wraps substantial depth and breadth of capabilities into the fewest number of interfaces,” writes Lauren E. Nelson, analyst, in a recent Forrester report. “Unlike other vendors in this space, HP adds functionality into a single interface as a rule without making the overall experience less intuitive.”

Enterprise-grade, open hybrid cloud solutions and services
The next-generation HP CloudSystem includes a new consumer-inspired user interface, simplified management tools and an improved deployment process that enable customers to set up and deploy a complete private cloud environment in just hours, compared to weeks for other private cloud solutions. As the foundation of a hybrid cloud solution, HP CloudSystem bursts to multiple public cloud platforms, including three new ones: Microsoft® Windows® Azure, and platforms from Arsys, a European-based cloud computing provider, and SFR, a French telecommunications company.

HP CloudSystem integrates OpenStack™-based HP Cloud OS technology, the foundation for HP’s hybrid cloud architecture, providing customers a hardened, tested OpenStack distribution that is easy to install and manage. The next-generation CloudSystem also incorporates the new HP Hybrid Cloud Management Platform, a comprehensive management solution that enables enterprises and service providers to deliver secure cloud services across public or private clouds as well as traditional IT.

Also launching this week, the HP Hybrid Cloud Management Platform integrates HP Cloud Service Automation (CSA) version 4.0 and includes native support for both HP CloudOS with OpenStack and the open-source standard TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications), enabling easier application portability and management of hybrid and heterogeneous IT environments.

To help customers architect and implement a hybrid cloud strategy, HP is adding a new hybrid-design capability to its global professional services capabilities. HP Hybrid Cloud Design Professional Services offer a highly modular design approach to help organizations architect a cloud solution that aligns with their technical, organizational and business needs. The new consulting services help customers evolve their cloud strategy and vision into a solution based on delivering business outcomes and ready for implementation.

HP is expanding its Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) offering, which is already helping hundreds of customers worldwide take advantage of the economics of a public cloud with the security and control of a private cloud solution. The new HP VPC Portfolio provides a range of VPC solutions, from standardized self service to a customized, fully managed service model. All HP VPC solutions deliver the security and control of a private cloud in a flexible, cost-effective, multitenant cloud environment. The latest version of HP Managed VPC now allows customers to choose among virtual or physical configurations, multiple tiers of storage, hypervisors and network connectivity types.

As part of its overall hybrid delivery, HP offers HP Flexible Capacity (FC), an on-premises solution of enterprise-grade infrastructure with cloud economics, including pay-for-use and instant scalability of server, storage, networking and software capacity. Now HP FC supports existing customer third-party equipment for a true heterogeneous environment. HP CloudSystem also can burst to HP FC infrastructure for customers needing the on-demand capacity without the data ever leaving the premises.

“The reality today is that CIOs want and need the benefits of cloud computing, but they are dealing with the complexities of a hybrid IT environment,” said Saar Gillai, senior vice president and general manager, HP Cloud. “HP Cloud solutions provide enterprises with a holistic and simplified approach for deploying, securing and managing workloads across hybrid delivery models, ensuring a successful cloud journey.”