HP's OpenStack-Powered Cloud Enters Public Beta

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HP reached a big milestone in its Converged Cloud initiative by kicking off a public beta for its HP Cloud Services suite.

The IT giant is entering the public cloud services market with an infrastructure based on OpenStack, an open source cloud platform developed by NASA and Rackspace. In just under two short years, the project has attracted an impressive army of supporters, many of which are making both financial and technological contributions.

OpenStack Momentum Builds

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IBM and Red Hat are among the latest to enter the OpenStack fold as the platform evolves beyond a group of loosely-linked contributors to an organized open source foundation. It has captured industry mind share as an open source alternative to cloud software based on proprietary technologies like Amazon’s AWS. In turn, a dynamic developer community has surfaced and the platform is currently fueling a growing OpenStack software and services market.

Indeed, HP emphasizes those factors as major selling points for its Cloud Services offerings. “Designed with OpenStack technology, the open-sourced-based architecture ensures no vendor lock-in, improves developer productivity, features a full stack of easy-to-use tools for faster time to code, provides access to a rich partner ecosystem, and is backed by personalized customer support,” says HP in a company statement.

Staying true to the timetable set by last month’s Converged Cloud announcement, HP Thursday flipped the switch on HP Cloud Compute, HP Cloud Object Storage and HP Cloud Content Delivery Network. The aim, according to the company, is to get businesses of all stripes — from web app startups to enterprises — up and running quickly on an infrastructure that scales to their needs.

“Whether you are an independent developer, ISV or the CIO of a major organization, the priority is to design your applications for today’s cloud economy,” said Zorawar Singh, senior vice president and general manager of HP Cloud Services, in a statement.

Costs are tallied using a pay-as-you-go model, as is typical with cloud services. For example, HP Cloud Object Storage costs $0.12 per GB per month up to 50 TB and drops to $0.10 per GB per month for the next 950 TB. HP is by slashing prices by 50 percent during the public beta period.

Early HP Cloud Partners

The HP Cloud Services public beta launches with the support of nearly 40 companies, a group that the company hopes will one day develop into a bustling HP Cloud Services Marketplace. The app store approach to cloud services and partner solutions calls for access and billing via a single, unified account.

For now, the HP Cloud Services partner ecosystem is made up of a mix of cloud providers, including management, security, storage and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) specialists. For instance, CloudSoft, RightScale and Smartscale Systems have joined HP on the cloud management front. Security options include Dome9 and SecludIT. ActiveState, CloudBees, and Gigaspaces are among the PaaS options.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.