HP broadens cloud strategy

HP has introduced enhancements to CloudSystem—the company’s platform for building and managing services across private, public and hybrid cloud environments—in an effort to give its enterprise customers more flexibility in how they deploy cloud services.

The primary enhancement is what HP calls a “dual bursting” capability, designed to help clients manage uneven resource demands. The function lets enterprise scale cloud-based resources up and down based on their needs via a public cloud provider or through an onsite pay-as-you-go cloud model.

“We’re providing enterprises that need to meet peak demand with two opportunities to get more capacity,” said Frances Guida, manager of cloud solutions for HP’s enterprise server, storage and networking group. The first method lets enterprises tap into resources at external service providers as needed, on a pay-per-use basis directly from the CloudSystem portal. “A user can very simply access that bursting capability in the same way they access it from an internal resource pool,” she said. (A demo of this capability is available here.)

The second method, called local burst, is designed for customers that need extra capacity but, for compliance reasons, are restricted in the infrastructure they can access and can’t use resources outside the enterprise, she said.

Beyond the ability to access bursting resources, Guida said, HP also has extended the heterogeneous nature of the CloudSystem platform. “We’re adding the ability to manage the provisioning of virtual machines that aren’t from HP,” she said.

The company also announced HP CloudAgile, a program that gives service providers access to HP’s global sales force to provide the full HP enterprise portfolio (including CloudSystem). HP also sells directly to enterprises, but the company doesn’t view the CloudAgile program as competitive with its own sales efforts.

“We think there is plenty of opportunity out there,” Guida said, adding that she sees time-to-market, not cost savings, as the primary driver for enterprise cloud adoption. “Just in the last six months I have seen an increase in the acceptance of cloud. Businesses are looking to do things quickly and they see cloud as a way of getting them there.