Ubuntu will power HP's new cloud service | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu will power HP's new cloud service

arstechnica.com

76 pointsdiogenescynic20 comments

Who in their right mind would trust HP as a cloud provider? Three CEO's in the past year. Each one completely different from the last. Can any customer have confidence that the HP cloud strategy will A) last beyond the current CEO and B) be better implemented than other recent product strategies?

Well at least using OpenStack should lessen the pain of switching cloud providers.

Re. A: what else is left? They dropped physical products to go after services. The cloud is one of them, so why would they drop it?

HP never burn their customers, especially enterprise customers. Even if they got out of the hardware business I'd have a lot of confidence that all my HP hardware would continue to be supported (after all - who ever bought that business is liable for support, and is really buying the business for the existing business relationships)

I might be unpopular for saying it, but WebOS was never a great fit for HP, and they did the right thing to kill it before they ended up in a situation where they had to support an unpopular platform. Maybe they should have spun it off, but keeping it as a HP platform didn't make sense.

No, for an (modern) HP offering "Cloud" is actually appropriate. Vague, nebulous, rarely seen up close. Never performs a lick of work, floats idly by. Occasionally crashes spectacularly. It's actually perfect branding.

It would be more accurate to say that OpenStack is powering HP's new cloud service. OpenStack has been adopted as the new UEC, and from my experience the development, documentation, and testing is almost completely geared towards Ubuntu hosts with KVM backends. So it should be no surprise that a commercial OpenStack deployment is going to based on the standard and best supported configuration.

Its nice to see OpenStack getting picked up by HP, I think that is the bigger story here....wonder why they would choose Ubuntu over HPUX....It should not be that difficult to port HPUX onto OpenStack. Also would like to see if HP's play here would be get enterprises on this new "Cloud" they are building.

Probably because HP-UX is a technical liability that they are keeping around just for the support contracts involved.

The hard reality is that while these operating systems (like HP-UX or Solaris) may still have some technical or commercial advantages, what really matters when you want to scale is the predictability and support for all kinds of cheap/expensive/old/new hardware and the availability of up-to-date software packages, and you really can't beat Linux there.

The issue is familiarity. Sun ran into the same issue with Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris. More programmers and sysadmins are just more familiar with Linux.

The big story here is the use of KVM.

KVM is mostly seen as a RedHat technology these days in the Enterprise, because RedHat provides most of the support for customers. I suspect in this case HP have built the expertise in-house.

The KVM people will be pleased to see this endorsement because most large public clouds (eg Amazon and Rackspace) are on Xen, and VMWare dominates the enterprise. KVM seems to have been stuck in the middle a little bit - used in a few enterprises, but not as many "name brands" as VMWare, and used in a few hosting providers, but none as big as Amazon and Rackspace.

They have had other wins (I think Oracle's enterprise virtulization is KVM based (not VirtualBox)) and I think IBM and Dell use it too. But none of them run public clouds.

not too familiar with cloud software, can someone point to a reference on why use openstack instead of Xen and VMWare stuff. I am not bashing openstack, I am trying to educate myself here...

Just curious, what can Ubuntu Server provide as a cloud OS that isn't already in Debian? Is it just the Canonical support?

I don't know if I would use it but I hope they contribute back to the community.

Come back Tru64 Unix, all is forgiven.

What happened to HP-UX?

HP-UX doesn't run on x86 and the cloud == x86.

But if they can port it to the Itanium instruction set then why not x86?

But who wants that? Aside from strategic reasons, why would it be better than Linux/KVM?

Whither WebOS?

WebOS isn't a server OS, it's a Linux userland for touch-based mobile devices.

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