HP announced HP Converged Cloud, which it describes as the industry's first hybrid delivery approach and portfolio based on a common architecture spanning traditional IT, private, managed and public clouds.
"The whole idea of converged clouds is to say that, increasingly, as the cloud matures, companies are no longer looking at just one cloud to provide for all their needs," Christian Verstraete, chief technologist for Cloud Solutions at HP, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "They are going to start using multiple clouds to respond to the needs of their business people. In that process, they will combine the private cloud, public cloud, and managed cloud. It just so happens that we have an offering in every one of those today - but what we want to do over time is get those environments closer to each other." The goal is to facilitate the joint management and joint positioning of those services to the end users while at the same time enabling movement of workloads from one to the other in as seamless as possible of a way, "and we are going to do that on top of a hardened OpenStack environment, which we already use today in our public cloud services," says Verstraete.
According to HP, the convergence of cloud computing and mobile connectivity is changing the way infrastructures are built, as well as the way applications are developed and information is delivered. Through an open, standards-based approach supporting multiple hypervisors, operating systems and development environments as well as a heterogeneous infrastructure and a partner ecosystem, HP aims to use Converged Cloud to enable enterprises to incorporate a blend of public, private and managed cloud services with their existing IT to create a seamless hybrid environment. HP Converged Cloud includes HP Converged Infrastructure, HP Converged Management and Security, Converged Information, and OpenStack technology.
As part of the HP Converged Cloud portfolio offerings, HP Cloud Services is moving its HP Public Infrastructure as a Service, from private beta to public beta starting May 10. The offering provides on-demand compute instances or virtual machines, scalable online storage capacity and accelerated delivery of cached content to end users. Also on May 10, HP Cloud Services will introduce, as a private beta, two additional infrastructure-as-a-service offerings - a relational database service for MySQL, and a block storage service that supports movement of data from one compute instance to another.
Enabling management of hybrid delivery environments, HP says its Cloud Maps can extend its integrated, open solution by providing prepackaged application templates that create a customized catalog of application services ready for deployment. Together with HP CloudSystem, Cloud Maps are intended to reduce the time to create new cloud services for enterprise applications.
To address the bottlenecks enterprises often experience when developing new cloud services on complex, legacy networks, HP is introducing HP Virtual Application Networks, a software solution which helps organizations improve the management, according to SLAs, of their virtual networks within their own physical networks, says Verstraete. The solution aims to speed application deployment, automates management and ensures network service levels in delivering cloud and virtualized applications.
To help test applications, HP also announced HP Service Virtualization 2.0, which enables clients to test the quality and performance of cloud or mobile applications without disrupting production systems. This is accomplished by offering access to restricted services in a simulated, virtualized environment. Even if people do not have access to all of the systems they need for testing, says Verstraete, the tools can simulate the systems they need in order to do the testing.
In addition, HP is launching two new networking services - HP Virtual Network Protection Service, which leverages best practices to set the baseline for security at the network virtualization management layer, thereby helping to mitigate common threats; and HP Network Cloud Optimization Service, which helps clients enhance their network to improve cloud-based service delivery.
And, for clients that want to have a private cloud but don't want to manage the whole private cloud on their own, HP has new Enterprise Cloud Services that provide offerings for private clouds, continuity services and unified communications. HP itself has extensive experience in cloud computing, notes Verstraete, citing the private cloud of Autonomy, an HP company, which and now manages more than 50PB of web content, video, email, and multimedia data on 6,500 servers in 14 data centers around the world.
Further extending the portfolio, HP also announced new HP Engineering Cloud Transformation Services that help product development and engineering design teams use the cloud to improve productivity and rapidly bring new products to market. For organizations, particularly those in discrete manufacturing, this can help engineers spend more time on developing products rather than managing their own IT, points out Verstraete. And finally, HP has added new Cloud Security Alliance training courses to give clients the knowledge to avoid potential security implications of cloud solutions.
More information about HP's new cloud solutions and services is available at www.hp.com/go/convergedcloud2012.