HP Converged Cloud is built on the vendor’s other Converged offerings for security, infrastructure and management, with open source standards based on technology from OpenStack. In research released along with Tuesday’s announcements that forecasts use of public and private cloud models doubling by 2020, HP introduced or updated: Cloud Maps, an open standards-based cloud development solution; HP Service Virtualization 2.0, its cloud testing software with enhanced cloud and mobile environment simulations; new networking releases including Virtual Application Networks for management of legacy movement in deployments; new cloud testing in its Enterprise Cloud Transformation Services; and new cloud management outsourcing in its Enterprise Cloud Services.
Christian Verstraete, CTO for HP’s Cloud division, says the maturation of the cloud and as-a-service offerings is leading to the availability of more hybrid on-demand resources for specific industries and to fill IT gaps.
“The businesspeople don’t care about infrastructure and it’s the speed at which the CIO can deliver services that becomes critical,” Verstraete says.
In May, HP also plans to make a beta release of its Infrastructure as a Service offering, with scalable online capacity in its public release and an additional relational database for MySQL and block storage in its private form.
HP’s announcements Tuesday come on the heels of other recent cloud strategy releases and acquisitions by rivals Oracle, Dell, IBM and SAP.
The announcement also came the same day that HP marked a data processing milestone in its private cloud for Autonomy, the U.K. analytics provider that it acquired in the biggest and possibly most contentious deal of 2011. The Autonomy private cloud surpassed more than 50 petabytes of Web content, video, email and multimedia data, spread across 6,500 servers at 14 global data centers, HP reported. The Autonomy cloud, which HP touted as the world’s largest private deployment, is powered by its automatic data recognition architecture, IDOL.
HP announced it had purchased Autonomy in August for approximately $10 billion, a deal backed by CEO Meg Whitman after it was first announced by Leo Apotheker, one of his last moves during a tumultuous year as chief executive.
Justin Kern is senior editor at Information Management and can be reached at justin.kern@sourcemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @IMJustinKern.
